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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



GOD AND THE 
SOLDIER 



BY 

NORMAN MACLEAN, D.D. 

AND 

J. R. P. SCLATER, D.D. 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, 1918 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



APR 13 1916 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

©CU494570 



PREFACE 

This book had its origin in one of the great 
camps in France where some of the chaplains 
had a weekly meeting presided over by the 
Rev. J. Harry Miller, one of the senior chap- 
lains. At these meetings the problems which 
confront the soldiers and the Church were 
freely discussed. At a time when the writers 
were working in that camp — the one as the 
Director of Religious Services in behalf of the 
Y. M. C. A. and the other as preacher and lec- 
turer with the Scottish Churches Huts — they 
were invited to open these discussions on alter- 
nate weeks. The addresses then delivered are 
now published in this form at the suggestion 
of those who took part in the discussions. 

The authors do not pretend to have arrived 
at any final conclusions. They only hope that 
these addresses will indicate the direction in 
which they found their thoughts moving when 
in touch with the grim realities of war. They 
do not claim to have given an answer to the 
questions which the war has evoked from many 



vi PREFACE 



troubled hearts ; they are only able to show how 
urgent these questions are. 

The different chapters were written without 
the advantage of mutual consultation, and they 
now appear with but slight alterations. If 
this book but show how the writers' minds were 
stirred by contact with the great army, and by 
intercourse with the men who are garrisoning 
its soul, and if it will lead others, with greater 
experience and fuller knowledge, to express 
frankly their thoughts on these problems, their 
purpose will have been served. 

N. M. 

J. R. P. S. 

Edinburgh, 

October 27th, 1917. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 
Is God to Blame? 11 

CHAPTER II 
The Unending War .......... 39 

CHAPTER III 
Redemption 65 

CHAPTER IV 
What Garrisons the Heart ..... 79 

CHAPTER V 
The Good Man 107 

CHAPTER VI 

The Swokd of the Saints 129 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 



CHAPTER VII 

Immortality » . 157 

CHAPTER VIII 
The Last Issue 175 

CHAPTER IX 
The Church . 195 

CHAPTER X 
Thi Last Judgment 287 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 



GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

CHAPTER I 
Is God to Blame? 

SOME chaplains tell us that theological 
questions are not rife in the minds of 
soldiers; and that, amongst the rest, the prob- 
lem of the Sovereignty of Divine Love over 
a world, in which this war has come to be, is 
of little concern to them. I think we may rea- 
sonably doubt that opinion — partly because it 
is inconceivable that those who see the horrors 
of war face to face should not find food for 
thought concerning the world-government 
which permits them, and partly because we 
have direct evidence to the contrary. In cer- 
tain instances, soldiers have been known to 
discuss this matter for long stretches of time, 
and sermons and addresses upon it, provided 
they were frank and open, never failed to rivet 

attention. But, for the most part, the man 

11 



12 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

who expected that those who were in daily 
touch with death would have much to teach 
him upon these perplexities came empty away. 
It is universally acknowledged that soldiers are 
mostly fatalists in time of battle. "If your 
luck's in, it's in: if it's out, it's out" is the 
common attitude. Only the bullet with a 
man's name and address on it will ever hit 
him; but no parapet will shield him when that 
one comes along. It is an attitude of mind 
that is Calvinistic, without the high, religious 
sense which a genuine Calvinism always pos- 
sesses. It only requires the exclamation, 
"Kismet!" to make it indistinguishable from 
the mental attitude of the East. Some reli- 
gious observers find comfort in its prevalence, 
but it is hard to see why they do. For it is 
only a new indication of the stupefying effects 
of war. 

At the same time, while there is this non- 
chalant assent to a rigid Sovereignty, which 
foreordains all that comes to pass, when sol- 
diers had time for reflection, after the actual 
strain of fighting was over, it needed little 
probing to discover that many were wondering 
how Christians were going to square, with the 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 13 

conception of a God of Love, the fact that 
yesterday a thousand bodies of human beings 
had been predestined to be blown into bloody 
pulp. "Whatever is right, this is not," ex- 
claimed a young officer, himself a candidate 
for the holy ministry, after a night of peculiarly 
gruesome experiences. The fundamental im- 
morality of the whole thing was the one point 
that he saw clear. And the question arose at 
once, what about God? Does He indeed 
create evil? And, if so, is He as worship- 
worthy as His own creatures, who would un- 
create it if they could? To these questionings, 
soldiers have no answer; but they expect one 
from the Church. Resolvings of contradic- 
tions, and visions of the higher unities do not 
come in the trenches: but a state of mind is 
engendered there, which makes for sharp criti- 
cism of traditional positions. Christian teach- 
ers will be put on their mettle in days to come 
by men who will want plain English on funda- 
mental matters. Not only by soldiers — but 
by that great multitude, which scarce anyone 
can number, whose hearts hold wounds that 
will not heal, and whose spirits are bitter within 
them. There are men walking our streets in 



14 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

whose hearts smoulder fires of resentment 
against a Universal Sovereignty which has 
bereft them of their sons; there are many 
French mothers who have taken refuge in the 
same cynicism which led a bereaved peasant- 
woman in a little village of Normandy to 
sneer, "Le bon Dieu, il est en permission." 
And for the Church blandly to go on saying 
that God could have prevented it all if He had 
chosen, and that, at the same time, He is as 
loving as Jesus Christ, is to make certain that 
these exceedingly hungry sheep, looking up, 
will not be fed. There are, indeed, some, and 
these often men whose piety entitles their 
opinions to respect, who deprecate over-much 
dogmatic speech upon such a matter, on the 
ground of the vital importance of retaining 
intellectual reverence. It is true that all 
men must approach the thought of God not 
only with humble hearts, but with humble 
minds. Who are we to utter counsel concern- 
ing the Most High? "Soon as we speak, we 
err." At the same time, it is the duty of the 
Church to declare God, according to her 
knowledge of Him, in the halting language 
which is the only medium we have for ex- 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 15 

pressing our thoughts. She has not feared 
to do so in days past; nor must she fear to- 
day, if she is to retain the respect of mankind. 



All branches of the Catholic Church, Re- 
formed and Unref ormed, hold a high doctrine 
of the Sovereignty of God. Not least con- 
spicuous amongst them in this direction has 
been the Scottish Church. The late Monsig- 
nor Benson, in a book estimating the various 
British Communions from the point of view 
of the Church of Rome, fastened especially 
on the Scottish doctrine of God as full and 
clear in the Catholic sense. Even when Pres- 
byterianism has set itself to simplifying its 
doctrinal statements, its declarations concern- 
ing God have been such as to make Him in all 
things supreme. "We believe in, and adore, 
one living and true God, Who is spirit, per- 
sonal, infinite and eternal, present in every 
place, the Almighty Author and Sovereign 
Lord of all ; most blessed, most holy, and most 
true; perfect in wisdom, justice, truth and 
love; to us most merciful and gracious: unto 



16 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

Whom only we must cleave, Whom only we 
must worship and obey. To Him be glory 
for ever." After such manner has statement 
been made, and no Catholic Christian will 
want to see such expressions enfeebled. A 
religious man feels that he can assent to no 
positions which prevent him from joining in 
the old triumphant shout, "the Lord God 
omnipotent reigneth." Consequently, no sur- 
prise need be felt that a certain impatience 
manifests itself with earnest and well-meaning 
people, even with Mr. Britling himself, who 
cast aside, as a worn-out garment, the grand 
phraseology in which, at all times, the Church 
has garmented her thought of the Supreme 
Being; or that taunts should be levelled at 
them to the effect that they are substituting a 
godling for God. No idea of the Uncreated is 
likely long to hold sway over men's minds 
which does not present Him as high and lifted- 
up, as the One from Whom all things flow, the 
great I am, Who inhabits eternity. Indeed, it 
is impossible that religion itself shall continue 
apart from a confidence in the controlling 
power of God. We cannot live unless we be- 
lieve that, while it is not in man that walketh 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 17 

to direct his steps, it is in God that ruleth to 
direct them for him. If there is no Will in 
which is our peace, there is no peace for us 
anywhere. Apart from faith in the directing 
power of God, the larger part of the Psalms 
would have to be cast away, and that the more 
valuable part. Therein would be a task of re- 
vision of the Psalter which would appal even 
Bishops. No longer could Scottish folk sing 
in their times of trial: 

"Before me still the Lord I set; 
Sith it is so that He 
Doth ever stand at my right hand; 
I shall not moved be." 

The one sure ground of optimism itself 
would be cut away from beneath our feet; for 
01 sr ultimate hope of good, for the individual as 
for the race, depends upon the final control of 
experience by "the great Over-reason we name 
Beneficence." It is because we believe, with 
the Psalmist, that the Lord reigneth that we 
can, with him, call upon the earth to be glad. 
An impoverished, struggling, half-helpless 
God can never be the God of Christianity. 



18 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



II 

Where, then, do we find ourselves? Every 
religious instinct we possess cries out "God 
reigns"; and, meantime, there are the ghastly 
facts of the war. Not, let it be observed, that 
these constitute any new problem. Probably 
the years of peace contained as much grotesque 
evil as the years of carnage. Cancer, con- 
sumption, to say nothing of syphilis, existed 
then; and the under-world was crawling with 
iniquities much more unlovely than the shat- 
tered forms of a battlefield. All that the war 
has done has been to make the problem of evil 
living to many minds that had hitherto known 
little of the more tragic aspects of life. We 
must not allow ourselves to imagine that our 
experiences of these past three years have 
created any new difficulty for Christianity. 
They have only diffused the knowledge of their 
existence, and have given edge and point to 
them for us all. We walk on paths that Job 
knew well, when we traverse the regions where 
human pain and divine love meet in seeming 
opposition. But, at the same time, a painful 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 19 

novelty is given to the question to-day, because 
of the number of people who are interested in 
it. Never before, in all the world's history, 
were so many hearts sad. Never before did 
the bat-like wings of despair cast so wide their 
hateful shadow. Hence it is that the thought 
of those who would heal has fastened itself 
anew on this age-long problem; hence the 
irritation with answers that seemed to satisfy 
in less poignant days. 

For theology, the battle rages round one 
word, the word "omnipotent." Many of the 
younger clergy will have nothing to do with it. 
They perceive clearly the logical pitfalls to 
which it is an unerring guide ; and they desire 
to see " all-conquering" in its place. Warn- 
ings as to the dangers contained in its use are 
not new. They have been pointed out for 
long. John Stuart Mill bluntly told us that 
if we laid it aside many of our difficulties would 
be laid aside with it. Mr. Thomas Hardy has 
been no less explicit: 

"Beneficent 
He is not, for He orders pain, 
Or, if so, not Omnipotent: 

To a mere child the thing is plain," 



GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



None can fail to feel sympathy with an 
attitude of mind which desires to part company 
with so uneasy a comrade as this word has 
proved to be. The fact that the Scriptures 
are full of it, and particularly the devotional 
Scriptures, need not distress us. For, apart 
from questions as to niceties of translation, the 
devotional Scriptures are not theological trea- 
tises. Indeed, they have suffered greatly 
from being so regarded. A word like omnipo- 
tent may be used in a hymn of adoration, 
where a theological writer might feel called 
upon to hedge it about with explanatory 
clauses. What we are to be concerned about 
is not a word, but the idea that the word con- 
veys. The question for the Church is not 
whether she believes in the omnipotence of 
God, but what meaning she puts into the term. 
The settlement of that question is likely to agi- 
tate us for some time to come. 

Ill 

First of all, we must come to agreement that 
the doctrine of the omnipotence of God does 
not include power to do everything that can 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 21 

be expressed in a grammatical sentence. 
Some critics of Christianity seem to imagine 
that a point is made if it is admitted that the 
Almighty can not perform some manifest ab- 
surdity, such as the creation of a world in which 
the laws of thought are blue and syllogisms are 
round. If God could do these things, we are 
all mad, for the juxtaposition of such ideas 
seems to us insane; and all our thoughts of 
Him are the thoughts of fools, and the sooner 
we forget them the better. Occasionally stout 
supporters of verbal orthodoxy play into the 
hands of these logical artists. A soldier in a 
hut in France not long ago claimed that God 
could do these very things, and thereby caused 
the ungodly present to rejoice. But even he 
found a limit to his thought of omnipotence. 
God could, according to him, make the laws of 
thought to be untrue ; He could make black to 
be white, and an object to be both at the same 
time and in the same respects ; He could secure 
that two and two should make five. But when 
he was asked if God could lie, he drew the line 
sharp and distinct. God cannot lie, he said; 
therein wisely agreeing with Scripture. 

Whereby we are brought to the presently 



22 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

most important proposition upon this matter 
— namely, that there are some things that God 
cannot do. Any doctrine of omnipotence 
must start from that point. The range of 
impossibility is, for the moment, of no import- 
ance. It is the fact that matters. We do not 
claim for God a power to do anything, however 
immoral or absurd. On the contrary, we 
vigorously deny not only that He would, but 
that He could, do anything of the sort. The 
extent of the limitation we do not attempt to 
define, but we admit its existence. And we 
are bound to try to make explicit the source 
from which it springs, which is none other than 
the moral nature of God Himself. God, the 
Ancient Truth, is true to Himself in all His 
ways ; and consequently much that we can im- 
agine as possible, or know to be actual, can 
never issue from His will. 

There seems at present a tendency to dis- 
cover a compulsion upon God outwith Him- 
self. The Platonic doctrine of Necessity is 
frequently appearing in a Christianised form. 
God is regarded as the Divine Artist, who is 
limited by the nature of the material in which 
He works. He has to make attempts to find 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 



out the noblest forms in which matter can be 
moulded: and His dream of a perfect world 
is thwarted by the intractable nature of that 
which constitutes the world. It is the old 
bargaining between Reason and Necessity over 
again; and the majority of Christian people 
will fail to find relief along that line. Apart 
from the insoluble dualism to which it leads, 
such views are opposed to the thought of the 
relation between God and the world, which is 
one of the clearest teachings of Scripture. 
Behind the world stands God; forth from the 
word of His power came all created things ; and 
without Him was not anything made that was 
made. The conception of a God struggling to 
reduce chaos to order, and continually rinding 
Himself hampered by a grim master more 
potent than Himself, may conceivably be true, 
but it is distinctly not Christian; and it would 
be better to admit the failure of the Christian 
view than to attempt to graft such ideas upon 
Christianity. Necessity manifestly exists ; but 
it must be a Necessity in the nature of God 
alone. 

What, then, are the Christian axioms con- 
cerning the nature of the Supreme Being? 



24 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

They are two, first that God is infinite Energy, 
and second that He is infinite Love. The 
former we learn from the works of His hands ; 
the latter through Jesus Christ. Not that we 
exclude the thoughts of God as holiness, or as 
altogether righteous, which the prophets were 
never weary of proclaiming. Far from it; we 
maintain that they are implicit in the concep- 
tion of Love as given by our Lord. Where- 
fore, we do not need especially to mention 
them. A love that is not holiness and justice 
is not the love of Christ. When we have said 
that God is love, we have said everything that 
lips can say concerning the moral majesty of 
the Most High. 

It is from these two fixed points that we 
must start, when we would speak about the 
compulsions within God. Theology has erred 
when it has begun from the Divine Sovereignty 
as axiomatic. The range and the type of any 
sovereignty is determined by the nature of him 
who wields it; and we cannot describe it in 
any terms, such as omnipotent, until we know 
that nature. It is, of course, always possible 
for theologians to say that, considered as Will, 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 25 

God is free to do anything. But that does not 
take us much further, because God is not un- 
conditioned Will. He is Love; and His Will 
moves at the dictates of love. To take a 
human illustration, an ordinary Christian man, 
considered as Will, is free to murder his 
mother. He has plenty of opportunity and 
plenty of means. Failing all others, his two 
bare hands could choke the life out of her. 
Nevertheless, the mother may sleep in peace. 
The sons simply could not do it. Contrari- 
wise, the sons may be conceived as free to re- 
fuse to go to their mother's aid if another at- 
tacker threatens them; but there are few sons 
who could sit still in the presence of such a 
spectacle. Action to defend would be inevi- 
table. In both cases they would will accord- 
ing to their love. 

Similarly with God. It is beyond contro- 
versy to say that, if He is Love, there are 
some things that He cannot do, and others that 
He must needs do, or fail to be Himself. And 
the conception of omnipotence must square 
itself with that fact. If the logicians demand 
it of us, we freely grant them that God is not 



26 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

only impotent to do that which contradicts love, 
but that He is impotent to avoid doing that 
which love demands. 

Can we, further, discern any definite acts 
in which this inherited compulsion of the divine 
Nature displays itself? Surely we can; even 
to the extent of laying down two propositions 
which go far to meet our difficulties : (1) that 
God, being energy, was compelled to create; 
and (2) that God, being love, was compelled 
to create this world. They are at least worth 
glancing at as subjects for discussion. 

IV 

Our Lord Jesus once Himself made state- 
ment of the ceaseless activity of God: "My 
Father," He said, "worketh hitherto: and I 
work." It is a picture of the God displayed 
in Nature — never quiescent, never passive, but 
ever bringing forth new forms of life. What 
else could a God who is Force be doing? We 
have sometimes thought of Him as One Who 
had a choice between dwelling in eternal inac- 
tivity, like some pale King of endless death, 
and "out of His mere good pleasure" fashion- 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 27 

ing the worlds ; as if He were a Being Who has 
power, rather than One Who is power. Sci- 
ence has come to rebuke and correct us, and to 
give us the conception of a God Who is a 
Cause. Words like "creation'* have perhaps 
too specialised a meaning. We should go no 
farther than to say that God must needs be 
continually expressing Himself in forms of 
life that flow from Him, and that continually 
are being moulded so to become a perfect ex- 
pression. All that we mean is that it is impos- 
sible for God eternally to do nothing. He 
must do something ; and our world is a part of 
the something, which, in point of fact, He has, 
by Himself, been compelled to do. 

The more important proposition is the sec- 
ond, that the Divine Energy, which is love, had 
no choice but to express itself in our world. 
For here lies all our difficulty. It is such a 
tragic world — so filled with sin and sorrow. 
If we had been denizens of regions full of radi- 
ance, we should never have asked ourselves 
whether there were any theological problems 
in the existence of the world. It is solely the 
existence of a world such as this in which we 
live that has brought our anxious enquiries 



GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



into being. But it is a less assailable position 
to occupy, to maintain that this world had to 
be, than to maintain that some creation had to 
be; provided we admit that God is Love. 
That fact, which is the sad world's hope, is also 
explanation. 

For love cannot exist in a vacuum. It is 
easier to believe in a God of eternal inaction, 
than in a God of Love without beings on whom 
the love can be exerted. To call a single Be- 
ing love, with no object to love, is as near a 
contradiction in terms as may be; for love in- 
volves a relation between two at least. There 
is a well-known theological argument upon the 
Holy Trinity, which is an admission of this 
fact. Dorner found that the thought of love 
in God was dependent for him upon the exist- 
ence of Persons within the Godhead, who could 
love each other. But, apart from the fact that 
this high region is "dark with excess of light," 
there is also the fact that such love must be the 
love of God for Himself, and does not, there- 
fore, afford opportunity for the complete dis- 
play of the loving principle. The doctrine of 
the Trinity is a great attempt to make credible 
the conception of absolute Personality; but its 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 29 

truth would not afford scope for the action of 
the love of God. That requires beings distinct 
from itself. Wherefore, we find from the 
Most High creatures proceeding, as children 
from a Father, made in His own image, but 
separate from Him, whom the Divine Heart 
can love and from whom it can receive love in 
return. 

Once this principle is admitted, the subse- 
quent difficulties for Christianity are greatly 
simplified. If the principle of love in God 
contains within itself the necessity of the crea- 
tion endlessly of beings with the power of lov- 
ing, at once the possibility of evil is in the 
world. For love is the free-est thing we know. 
Obedience, allegiance, service can be com- 
pelled; but love, never. It has to be given. 
The moment that God created beings with a 
dower to love, He created them free; and the 
moment He created them free, He created the 
power to hate instead of to love, and, conse- 
quently, the possibility of the jarring of all the 
harmonies of the world that should be so full 
of concord and of loveliness. 

It must be observed that a great deal de- 
pends on this idea of inherent compulsion. If 



30 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

God could have refused to create a world of 
free beings, why did He not do it, seeing the 
ghastly horrors that freedom has brought in its 
train? We claim for Him foreknowledge, or 
rather the omniscience of One Who, from the 
high places of the Everlasting Now, looks 
down upon the tides of time ; and if He, before 
the foundation of the world, saw the agonies 
and heard the shrieks that are multiplied a 
thousandfold to-day between Flanders and the 
Vosges, why did He not stay His hand? It 
will not do to ride off on pleas of "self -limita- 
tion." If a man refuses to fashion an evil 
himself, but restrains himself from its removal, 
though it be within his power to end it, he is 
no less blameworthy ; and we think poorly of 
God, if we apply to Him meaner ethical 
standards than we would apply to ourselves. 
Either God had to create a world of free be- 
ings, or He had not. If He had not, He is 
ultimately responsible for the tragedies which 
they suffer and cause. But if Love must 
needs bring into being creatures that can love, 
and if they choose to use their freedom bane- 
fully, then there are no shoulders on to which 
to lay the blame but their own. 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 31 



Let us, then, assume that the appearance of 
a world of creatures with a power to love, and 
therefore free, was of necessity, owing to the 
nature of God. It is clear that rebellion 
against the perfect Will was a possibility; in 
point of fact, we all know that it is a reality. 
But it may be doubted if we realise how vast 
that reality is. 

There can be little question that most of us 
suffer from too good a conceit of our own 
world. We speak as if this little earth were 
the universe; whereas it is a somewhat incon- 
siderable member of a third-rate planetary 
system. We regard ourselves as the grand 
rebels against Eternal Love, when, in fact, we 
are grasshoppers and the children of grass- 
hoppers. Ancient Christian teaching should 
come back and help us to be humble. We 
learn, in ancient story, of high rebellion against 
the Most High, from which our little tragedies 
have issued. 

There is nothing in reason which should 
make it difficult for us to think that the uni- 



GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



verse contains greater created intelligences 
than our own. From the Primal Source there 
surely has flowed a stream of beings of vaster 
make than we are — great Angels that do His 
bidding, Cherubim and Seraphim that contin- 
ually do praise Him. And tradition has it 
that the chief est of all (for Lucifer was first of 
all creatures in loveliness and power) was he 
who found it earliest in his heart to misuse his 
freedom. From him the miasma spread, until 
an atmosphere was developed, which is the real 
Prince of the Power of the Air, which has 
tended, for those that breathe it, to make 
rebellion easier than obedience, and sin than 
righteousness. 

The fact is that the Church must consider 
again the doctrine of the Devil. In recent 
times it has been laughed out of court; but 
it is far from a laughing matter. Not that we 
are called upon to believe in an absolutely 
malignant Will, that opposes itself to the Will 
of God; but that we must consider the possi- 
bility of the existence of beings, vastly greater 
than ourselves, which, like ourselves, are sinful 
in the sense of resisting God's purposes, and 
which, with us, are creating a "tone," that sur- 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 



rounds us — in which, in a tragic sense, we live 
and move and have our being — whereby God's 
Will is thwarted and the beauty of His world 
is marred. 

In fact, the dire possibility seems to have 
occurred. The freedom that comes with love 
has been misused ; and that on a terrific scale. 
God finds the world, that came from Him at 
Love's impulse, in a turmoil of opposition to 
Himself. Is He to blame? How can He be 
to blame? The devices and desires of self- 
willed hearts are to blame. It is sin that has 
brought all these horrors upon us. Even the 
poor earth itself, which was meant to be so fair, 
has been turned to ugliness thereby. France 
used to be called "la Belle France." Go to 
Contalmaison to-day and mark how fair she is. 
Her once lovely undulations, dotted with 
peaceful villages, are one long, desolated sea of 
mud. God may be unable to prevent the mis- 
use of freedom; but He can secure that we 
make its results extremely ugly, and thus urge 
us to seek beauty and peace in harmony with 
His Will. All unloveliness, all that brings 
terror to the heart in Nature, ultimately, per- 
haps, may be traced to the door of rebellion 



34 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

against God. If men can make such travesties 
of the beauty of France, cannot the influence 
of the larger revolts against God's Will be seen 
in the confusions that perplex us in Nature? 
After all, all phenomena are the expression of 
spiritual realities ; and devil-fish and octopuses 
may be only indications of the confusion 
brought into God's world by the invasion of it 
by spirits that have turned from Him. If a 
stranger, say from Mars, were brought into the 
world and told that God had made it, and then 
was taken to see the ruins of Ypres, he would 
be puzzled about God. He would be eased in 
his mind if he knew that these desolations of 
once happy homes were due to man in his 
proud rage. Similarly, if we knew more, that 
which seems terrible in Nature may be ex- 
plained. The influence of misused freedom 
may very easily spread more widely than we 
are ordinarily inclined to admit. 



VI 



In any case, God is no more to blame for the 
world's tragedies, than a father is to blame for 
the sorrows of a wilful son. But if that be so, 



IS GOD TO BLAME? 



where is our confidence? If the world has 
turned against God, and if there be forces in it 
that work against Him, where is His control? 
What happens to the quiet confidence of a 
mother, who, in prayer, leaves her lad in God's 
hands ? Our one security is this — "the Son of 
God goes forth to war." 

There is no question that He is at war. 
And He shows forth the Father, who is no 
quiescent God, beaten back by the powers of 
evil; but a God who is correcting, adjusting, 
transmuting — working in every way for the 
final perfecting of His kingdom. Pain, then, 
as we see it, is not a difficulty ; it is an evidence 
of a God, Who has thrust Himself into the 
struggle, and will not yield till victory comes. 
And He has His coming victory sure. We 
cannot prove it, but we believe that Love will 
win in the end. We believe that Love is very 
strong. We believe that the sharp, merciful 
weapons of pain and loss and darkness will be 
used to the uttermost. We believe that in the 
days of carnage the loveliness of Love will be- 
come only more apparent. We hope that all 
created beings finally will turn from their 
wickedness and live; and then at last all crea- 



36 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

tion, which has travailed and groaned in pain 
together until now, will reflect the glory of 
His presence, Who then will be all in all. 
Our confidence is not in an arbitrary Ruler 
Who ordains, but in a Heavenly Father Who 
will never yield His children even to their 
own follies. We trust in the unfailing pa- 
tience of God, seen in Him Who went out to 
seek the one lost sheep, far amidst the distant 
mountain-sides, until He found it. We be- 
lieve that God is working and fighting for us 
and for our beloved; we believe that He is 
Love and that Love is the greatest thing in the 
world. Wherefore, as they pass from us to 
danger, we still confidently sing, "The Lord 
shall keep thy soul." 



THE UNENDING WAR 



X 



CHAPTER II 
The Unending War 

THE thought often crosses the mind how 
splendid the world would be were there 
no strife, no evil, no holocaust of war. Why- 
did not God so order the world that men 
would be ever at peace and ever happy? One 
answer to that may well be that there are 
greater things in life than peace and happi- 
ness. Man was not placed on earth to taste 
sweetness and be cloyed of happiness; but 
rather that he should do noble and great things 
and prove himself a God-made man. But 
there can be no noble deeds if the deeds are 
done by compulsion. There would be no 
value in being good if it were impossible to 
be anything else. It may delight the imagina- 
tion to conjure up the vision of an earthly par- 
adise when man would be innocent because un- 
tempted, sinless because the way of sin was 
barred, but such a life would be that of a soul- 
less mechanism — the life of stagnation. And, 

39 



40 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

when all is said, progress in the wilderness is 
better far than stagnation in any Paradise. 
God therefore made us men, endowing us with 
the gift of freedom, and not mere cogs in a 
wheel. So great is the gift of freedom that 
God risked all anguish that the love of His 
children might be the love of free men and not 
of slaves. And if the gift of freedom implied 
the possibility of its misuse, conflict and the 
battle long drawn out, yet it is worthy of the 
price. For goodness bearing the stamp of the 
fire is infinitely greater than a mechanical inno- 
cence. 



The gift of freedom has entailed a long and 
weary fight against sin. By that word sin our 
fathers meant everything that resisted and 
fought against the purpose of the God of 
Righteousness. We, however, have lost, in 
great measure, the sense of the grievousness 
of sin. We have ceased to bother about sin. 
We have replaced agonizing for sin by organ- 
izing for material betterment. We have re- 
placed the old story of man's fall by a theory 
that what happened was really a jump up- 



THE UNENDING WAR 41 

ward! There are to-day multitudes who feel 
no more responsibility for their sins than they 
do for the colour of their hair. The story of 
Eve and the Serpent is now deemed to be but 
a parable in the dawn of history, and so dis- 
missed. The sense of sin decreased as the 
mockery of the serpent theory increased. It 
is easy to mock ; easy to show that there never 
were such persons as Aphrodite or Bacchus. 
But the question is — are there no such things? 
Though the origin of sin be veiled in the mists, 
the fact of sin remains, and its withering blight 
is still cast over humanity. And, if we read 
it aright, there has never been written a story 
more true to fact that the story of men's first 
sin. It is the story of every soul that God has 
made. The voice of the tempter is the voice 
that comes alluringly to every heart — take 
thine ease, eat, drink and be merry. It is the 
voice of the siren on the shore that calls the 
toilers at the dull mechanic oar to turn aside 
and surrender the wide ocean of peril and con- 
flict for the still haven where the body is 
drugged with languor and physical delight. 
It is against that power that is ever threaten- 
ing moral destruction that men are summoned 



42 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

to wage a war in which there is no discharge. 

It is the duty of every soldier to consider 
the might of his enemy. To underrate the 
forces arrayed against us is to court disaster. 
Though, to this end, it may help us to acquaint 
ourselves with the history of the struggles of 
men long ago with sin, yet it is only when 
we face sin as a reality in our own heart, that 
we realise the might of that grip from which 
we cannot escape. It is not by a measuring 
line stretching across the centuries, but by cast- 
ing the plummet into the depths of our own 
hearts that we can measure the might of sin. 

There, in our hearts, we find a constant war- 
fare being waged : the flesh warring against the 
spirit and the spirit against the flesh. And 
He Who fashioned us has hung the mechan- 
ism on this so delicate a poise that on the 
victory of the spirit over the flesh depends 
the issue of the soul's enrichment or impov- 
erishment. The animal knows nothing of this 
struggle, but its life is poor and mean. It 
gazes on a world of beauty and sees nothing 
but grass. Man gazes at the same landscape, 
but he sees colour, radiance, a world of splen- 
dour. In proportion as the spirit conquers 



THE UNENDING WAR 43 

the flesh is the glory of the vision he sees. If 
the flesh conquers in the fight, the man sinks 
into the animal ; if the spirit conquers, the man 
is enriched with the spoils of victory. Vision, 
inspiration, knowledge, goodness — these are 
the prizes of the conflict. To war against sin 
is thus to curb the tiger within us. The hour 
when man first heard the bugle-call summon- 
ing him to fight the animal within him and de- 
clined the conflict, was the hour of sin's entry 
into the world. 

But sin, when traced to its source, is not 
merely the victory of the flesh over the spirit, 
of the animal over the man, for that is only 
its manifestation. The true source is in the 
man's will. We surrender to the flesh because 
we will it to be so. We may abhor ourselves 
for doing it ; we do it because we love it. The 
true source of sin then is in the will of man 
setting itself in hostility to the will of God. 
God's will for man is that he should live the 
God-centred life and that he should ally him- 
self with that purpose of God which is ever 
striving to evolve righteousness and goodness 
out of the tangled skeins of human life. But 
such an alliance demands toil, watchfulness, 



44 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

self-denial even unto the subjugation of the 
flesh. And we prefer ourselves and the grati- 
fication of our low desires. God's will is that 
we should live lives of unselfishness, and find 
our happiness in bearing the burdens of our 
fellows. But we choose the life of self-inter- 
est, sacrificing the lives of others to our base 
cravings. Thus the seat of sin is in the will, 
and every manifestation of sin is selfishness. 

II 

But the souls of men can never realise the 
heinousness of sin until they see it in the light 
of God's eternal purpose and its black shadow 
against the background of His holiness. This 
was ever the way in which the soul realised 
sin. It is when God becomes a reality to us 
that we are stung broad awake and see our- 
selves as rebels against His will. It was al- 
ways thus. "I have heard of Thee with the 
hearing of the ear," declares Job; "but now 
mine eye seeth Thee and I abhor myself and 
repent in dust and ashes." The vision of God 
arises and the faltering lips of the prophet 
exclaims: "Woe is me! for I am undone; be- 



THE UNENDING WAR 45 

cause I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell 
in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for 
mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of 
hosts." The moral passion for righteousness 
from which Christianity drew the power which 
enabled it to re-vitalise humanity was just this. 
Against the vision of the All-Holy God the 
eyes of men saw the heinousness of sin. It 
may sound strange in our ears when we hear 
the words: "When He shall come He shall 
convince the world of sin . . . because they 
believed not on me." The primary work of 
the Holy Spirit is to-day what it was at the 
beginning — to convince of sin. It was only 
when that conviction came that Christianity 
launched forth on that long campaign against 
sin whose end is not yet. We can trace the 
mental and spiritual processes by which the 
early Christians arrived at. that conviction. 
For three years He was to them a Rabbi; for 
forty days He was but returned from the 
shadows of death to raise a material realm — 
to restore the Kingdom to Israel. But the 
revealing spirit of God comes, and they under- 
stand. The mists are swept away and they 
see. They envisage the beauty of His life, 



46 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

seeing it so clearly that the conviction comes 
that He was of God. They could not sepa- 
rate what they saw in Him from the thought 
of God. The qualities which shone in His 
face — love, purity, tenderness, self-sacrifice 
stronger than death — were the qualities which 
must be of the very essence of God. God 
must have been in Him as He never was in 
mortal man. And yet, how did the world act 
towards Him? "They believed not," and 
their unbelief nailed Him to a Cross. The 
Cross now shone luridly before their eyes as 
the symbol of all the forces of hostility to God 
— those forces that spurned the Holy One and 
cried "Away with Him." For what was sin 
but this — the selfishness that so hardened the 
heart and blinded the eye that men could see 
no beauty in the pure and could mete out no 
measure save the Cross. 

For the early Church, thus, the unbelief that 
raised the Cross was the measure of sin. And 
the sin of which it was the measure was just 
selfishness. For that was what stirred the im- 
placable hatred of pharisee and priest and 
moved the Roman reluctantly to assent to the 
Cross. To the Pharisee whose conception of 



THE UNENDING WAR 47 

religion was the directed life, the controlling of 
hands and feet and tongue by innumerable 
rules, He came and said that the directed life 
must be replaced by the God-rilled life, and 
the fettered hand by the heart aflame with 
God. The Kingdom of God was within. 
But they would not have it. Such a teaching 
would be the end of their traditions and the 
overthrow of their dignity. So self cried: 
"Crucify Him." And He came to the priest 
and said that the blood of burnt offerings 
availed nothing, that what God yearned for 
was the purity of heart that hungered for 
righteousness, and He struck a blow at their 
ill-gotten gains by driving their merchandise 
out of the courts of the Father's house. And 
they saw nothing but the end of their power if 
this were allowed, and they cried "Crucify." 
For them the Roman had nought but contempt 
and he wanted to save the victim of their 
blinded hearts, until an appeal was made to his 
selfishness also. "If thou let this man go thou 
art not Caesar's friend," they cried, and he 
foresaw an appeal to Rome and an enquiry 
which his life could not bear unscathed. And 
self said "Crucify." That mass of human self- 



48 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

ishness, that blinded self-will, so shone in all 
its heinousness before the opened eyes of the 
early Christians that they spoke the word sin 
with a shudder, and had one cry on their lips: 
"What must we do to be saved?" Thus they 
came to realise, as they beheld sin in relation 
to the purity and holiness that could be only of 
God, that religion must ever have its rise in the 
heart convinced of sin. And what was true 
then is true to-day. If any man or nation say : 
"I have no conception of sin, nor do I realise 
myself to be a sinner," the Lord Jesus Christ 
passes that man or nation by, and He says, "I 
have nothing for you, nothing." And He 
cannot have, for He is just this: the Saviour 
from sin. 

Ill 

What the world then needs to-day is just 
what it needed nineteen centuries ago, to be 
convinced of sin. If ever the world is to learn 
that lesson it is surely to-day. In that dawn 
long ago One Cross outside Jerusalem con- 
vinced those who saw it aright of sin. To-day 
ten million crosses gleam in the rank grass, 
where the flower of humanity lie buried, man- 



THE UNENDING WAR 49 

gled and torn; and as the world contemplates 
these unnumbered Calvaries, surely it also will 
be convinced of sin. "The Boche is saving the 
world because he has shown what evil is," said 
a French officer to Rudyard Kipling at the 
front. If ever the world is to realise the hor- 
ror of sin it must surely be there. For the 
Calvaries are everywhere. 

Let one stand in the midst of that ruined 
civilisation and contemplate what he sees ; and 
what he sees is just the fruitage of sin. Con- 
sider just one scene. In the centre of the dead 
town of Peronne stand the ruins of the parish 
church. The fallen roof lies along the nave, 
an undulating ridge from the west door to the 
high altar that lies buried under the debris. 
The organ wires hang loose in the wind in the 
west gallery. The sacred pictures are shreds, 
the statues of saints broken, and no sound is 
there but the singing of the birds. But on one 
pillar of a broken arch still stands a life-size 
effigy of the Christ. One hand has been 
broken; a splinter of shell has torn His side 
and grazed the pillar, revealing a vein of red 
in the stone. As you look, that wounded side 
seems to be bleeding. And the face of the 



50 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

Christ looks out through the broken arches on 
the town where every house is a ruin, laid low 
by the retreating enemy. He sees the cradles 
in the rain ; the little libraries, masses of pulp ; 
and the scenes of human happiness and love as 
Aceldama. And beyond the town He looks 
out on the fields which once waved with golden 
grain, where now the wind only stirs the weeds 
among which the white crosses gleam on the 
graves. Past these fields of death He looks 
to the north where the guns rumble and shal- 
low graves are being dug ceaselessly. And as 
one gazes there come from the chambers of 
memory the words: 

"Whose sad face on a cross sees only this, 
After the passion of a thousand years." 

Nineteen hundred years of Christianity and 
this is what we have made of it ! It is not the 
horror of war that the eyes behold : it is the hor- 
ror of sin. For war is only the symptom of 
the hidden disease as raving is the symptom 
of fever. It is not the fault of the Christ ; it is 
the crime of the world that refused to believe 
on Him. For these centuries His spirit has 
striven with the world. He has declared that 



THE UNENDING WAR 51 

the only life God means for men is the life of 
love. He has pled with men declaring that 
there is only one way of conquering — love; 
that it is useless to conquer men's bodies un- 
less you conquer their hearts; that it is futile 
to subjugate provinces when the subjugation 
means the loss of the love of men, the isolation 
of the conqueror in the midst of humanity from 
all that ennobles life. He has declared to each 
generation that love does not kill, that love 
does not say, "I am better than you, be thou 
my slave"; but that what love says is: "You 
are better than I am — let me carry your bur- 
den." But this road was too beautiful to be 
trodden by the gross feet of men. They chose 
the way not of the nailed hand but of the 
mailed first— the way of hatred, of lust, of 
murder and of rapine. That is the source of 
the world's blood and tears. It is sin that 
blinded the eyes of men and hardened their 
hearts so that they refused to believe the Lord 
of Love or follow the Prince of Peace. Thus 
the world to-day is filled with the red harvest 
of sin. 

If, to-day, under leaden skies, you listen in 
France to the sighing of the wind as it goes 



52 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

wailing through the broken pillars and arches 
of ruined shrines, as it stirs the coarse grasses 
around white crosses that gleam over fields of 
death far as the eye can see, as it sighs and 
moans over trenches where the living lie in the 
slime under the shadow of the world's woe, as 
it sings its coronach through the roofless, rain- 
sodden rooms where desolation is seated by 
the rusty tireless grates that erstwhile warmed 
the hearts of men to joyous laughter, as it 
sweeps round playgrounds where no longer 
children shout in merriment, as it whines 
through broken, blasted stumps that erstwhile 
were verdant woods of gracious shade, with 
glades of greenness, what that wind whispers in 
your ear is this : "Behold what comes to men 
when they choose iniquity for their portion and 
spurn the Lord of love. This is the harvest- 
ing of sin!" 

Not only has sin let loose this flood that has 
overwhelmed the world, but, now, it has 
achieved another triumph. It forbids the 
damming of that flood ; it decrees that its dev- 
astation must go on. For that is what the 
answer of President Wilson to the Pope 
means. The Holy Father cried to men: 



THE UNENDING WAR 53 

"Cease from this havoc, this holocaust of mu- 
tual destruction." But the President replied 
that it could not cease because no man could 
trust the truth or honour of the enemy. Those 
who marched over broken treaties to the ruin 
of the world, would march over broken treaties 
again to the same ruin. To treat with them 
would only condone their crimes without se- 
curing the future. The sin of falsehood to 
which they had sold themselves made it impos- 
sible to make peace with them. Thus, to-day, 
sin holds the throne of the world. It has let 
loose the dogs of war; it, now, forbids their 
kennelling. And thus the world goes reeling 
to doom. Truly the world to-day is the apoth- 
eosis of sin triumphant. 

IV 

But the saddening fact confronts us that 
the world, though millions of Calvaries stand 
thus on the blasted earth, refuses still to be 
convinced of sin. It strives to diagnose every 
possible source of its misery — except sin; it 
seeks every remedy save the way of salvation 
from sin. Each day brings forth a new pan- 



54 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

acea, a new society for the abolition of war. 
Some ex-Lord Chancellors and learned men 
formed such a society recently. These cave- 
dwellers do not ask: What would be the re- 
sult, suppose they succeeded, by signatures on 
parchment, in abolishing war? It would only 
mean, the world being as it is, that humanity 
would plunge deeper than ever into the mire; 
that, this last terror removed, they would make 
the world a Sodom which would need another 
Dead Sea to cover its iniquity from the sight of 
heaven. There can be no way of ending war 
except the way of conquering sin. The way 
of death is to assuage the symptom while the 
disease is left to devour the fibres of life un- 
checked. 

To-day the world is blind to its true malady 
— its refusal to believe on the Lord of love — 
because the world has been stricken by the 
plague of Pharisaism. And of all the mani- 
festations of sin that is the most ugly. For 
other sins, sins of hot blood and of the eager 
spirit, the Lord had only infinite pity; but 
against Pharisaism His anger blazed into white 
heat and His words became as sharpened 
swords: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Phari- 



THE UNENDING WAR 55 

sees, hypocrites." The hardest of all sins to 
combat is this. There is good hope that the 
publican may seek after God ; but the Pharisee 
making broad his phylacteries, and thanking 
heaven that he is not as these others, has no 
need to seek anywhere. 

Never in all its history was the world 
stricken by this plague of Pharisaism as it is 
to-day. Europe is perishing, reeling in its own 
blood, but nobody is at fault. The Germans 
are convinced that they did not begin the war ; 
they are only waging on foreign soil a cam- 
paign in defence of their homes and all they 
hold dear. Even their rulers, who decreed the 
war, protest passionately that they did not be- 
gin it; and such is the capacity of the human 
heart for self-deception, that doubtless they 
are quite sincere. France knows that she did 
not begin this war — that France all unpre- 
pared, with its manhood desiccated. Austria 
proclaims that she did not begin the war — 
she was ready to arbitrate to the last. And 
Russia, convulsed with the pangs of dissolu- 
tion, holds fast the belief that she did not be- 
gin the war. The other Powers of the Conti- 
nent certainly did not begin it, for only later 



56 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

were they sucked into the vortex of its devour- 
ing flood. And of one thing, at least, we in 
these Islands know for sure, and that is that 
we did not begin the war. A nation that could 
only land a handful of soldiers on the Conti- 
nent was not likely to seek the blind arbitra- 
ment of war. So far from causing the war, we 
entered upon it reluctantly, impelled only by 
the spirit of chivalry and Christian duty that 
would not suffer us to stand by and see the 
small nations of Europe perishing beneath the 
heel of tyranny. Thus, for three dread years, 
Europe has thanked high heaven for her sin- 
lessness, and Britain has had a special litany 
of her own in which she proclaimed to heaven 
and earth that she at least "tore up no scraps 
of paper." The spirit of self-righteousness 
has conquered the world, and on the altar of 
Pharisaism humanity has offered up awful 
hecatombs. Look where one will, one can 
scarcely see in Europe to-day any nation that 
feels any need for repentance. There is 
scarcely any material left which the spirit of 
God can kindle into cleansing and renewing 
flame. 

We are not concerned with the guilt of other 



THE UNENDING WAR 57 

nations, and we would not condone their 
crimes. To their own God they stand or fall ; 
and it does no good to confess the sins of 
others except ministering to our own self -right- 
eousness. What we have to ask is: are we 
really so innocent and guiltless? "Yes," you 
say; "we have torn no scraps of paper; we are 
waging a holy war ; we have done nothing but 
right and fair and what Christian duty re- 
quired." Surely it is time that we awoke 
from the drugging of this litany of our sinless- 
ness. "Tore up no scraps of paper!" Why 
is that a virtue? Because the scrap of paper 
was the law of truth and honesty and we 
observed its precepts. But whose law is it, 
this of truth and honesty? God's law, of 
course — and it is its divine source that makes 
its tearing up so heinous. And the great 
Law-Giver proclaims that we, who honoured 
our word, are pleasing and innocent in His 
sight. 

If there were only one law of God with one 
precept enjoining honesty in international re- 
lationship, then our vaunting of innocence 
would not be amiss — though the man who pro- 
claims loudly his righteousness suggests that 



58 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

he needs to proclaim it! But by what right 
do we out of the laws of God select one and 
found on that one alone a ritual of self -right- 
eousness? The laws of God are a unity; to 
observe one if we break the others, does not 
make us right with God. Let us think of other 
laws of God — written also on paper. There 
is the law of love. Have we as a nation — the 
greatest on earth — striven to commend that 
law to other nations and sought by our policy 
to make them realise that above armaments 
and rulers there is another King, one Jesus? 
Have we striven to make that law operative 
even within our own borders? Let our class 
warfare and the chasm between our slums and 
our mansions answer the question. Methinks 
we have torn up that scrap of paper. There 
is a law that righteousness alone shall fill the 
hungry heart. Have we observed it? Let 
the hundreds of thousands wounded by their 
sins answer the question; let the race threat- 
ened at its source answer the question. There 
is a law of sacrifice that they only gain their 
life who are willing to lose it. How did we 
observe it during long years? We hold the 
fourth of the world's surface, with most of its 



THE UNENDING WAR 59 

wealth, under our flag, but we held it by an 
army equal in size to that of Switzerland. 
And why? Because we would not sacrifice 
pleasure and ease to duty. We mocked the 
prophets who summoned us to leave the fields 
of our pleasure for the fields of hardness. 
By refusing to prepare to defend our wealth 
we invited the spoilers. But we are innocent, 
and tore up no scraps of paper! There is a 
law that it does not profit to gain a world 
and lose the soul. We gained the world, build- 
ing up an empire such as the sun never saw. 
Did we do it merely by accident — in moments 
of absentmindedness? Did we do it for com- 
merce and wealth and greatness or for the bet- 
terment of the soul of the world? Let the 
trade in rum on the coasts of Africa, in part 
answer the question. There is a law: do not 
steal; did we observe it? Did we not rear a 
civilisation on the basis of individualistic com- 
petition which massed riches largely by dis- 
honesty? There is a law that men should bear 
one another's burdens. Have we recast it so 
that it reads: share ye one another's bonuses? 
There is a law enjoining the Sabbath day to 
be kept holy. Have we observed it in letter 



60 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

or in spirit? But, however we may have trans- 
gressed the laws of the Unseen, we are con- 
scious of one fact that sustains us amid the 
fury and the onslaught: we are righteous, we 
are innocent of the blood of the slain. "Eng- 
land still remains to be taken out of the stupor 
of self-satisfaction," declared Admiral Beatty 
in January, 1916. And the armour of that 
self-satisfaction is still without a crevice 
through which the arrow of conviction can 
pierce. There has been in England a mission 
of Repentance and Hope, but the word re- 
pentance stuck in the throats of the prophets. 
They explained it away; there was no repen- 
tance called for in regard to the war. The 
Holy Spirit was directed that this matter was 
outside His province. The result has been 
that there has been no repentance and no 
dawning of hope. And thus the problem of 
how to convince a righteous world of sin is 
one that overwhelms the heart. 



The grimmest fact in all the history of the 
world is this fact of sin. The history of 



THE UNENDING WAR 61 

humanity is mainly the history of sin. It has 
dug the grave for empires and civilisation in 
the past; it is digging the grave of empires to- 
day. Stand amid the ruins of great capital 
cities, now briar-heaps — in Tyre, or Carthage, 
or Babylon — or amid the vestiges of the glory 
that was Greece — and ask what worked this 
woe? And the only answer is sin. To-day 
the might of sin has ravaged the world, and 
swept well-nigh the whole of humanity into a 
maelstrom of blood. It has strewn the streets 
of every city in the world with the wreckage 
of broken, shattered lives. The horrors of 
peace are more awful than even the horrors of 
war. (It is more dangerous to be a child in 
the slums of London or Glasgow than to be a 
soldier in the trenches in Flanders.) It has 
turned even the gospel of love into that loath- 
some Pharisaism that knows not the canker 
from which the heart is perishing. As the soul 
contemplates this dread and unconquered foe, 
despair falls upon it. This is a problem that 
demands the intervention of God. It is to this 
warfare that God calleth His sons. It is vain 
to conquer the enemy without if the nation 
fall into the clutches of degeneration within. 



GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



It is for this warfare that every soldier who 
would serve and save his race and the world 
must gird himself. It is a warfare harder far 
than that against flesh and blood, and in it 
there is no discharge. God alone can win the 
victory in this age-long fight. But God can- 
not win it unless we enlist and fight under His 
banner. It is great to die for England; it is 
greater far to live for England — and for the 
world. The only way of living for the world 
is to fight sin. 



REDEMPTION 



CHAPTER III 

Redemption 

IT was a frequent and striking experience at 
divine service amongst soldiers to observe 
the response that was given to preaching upon 
the Cross. Not that the vast majority seemed 
to be well instructed upon this so great matter. 
Somewhat elementary statements came to the 
ears of many with surprising freshness. But 
it was manifest that the story of a Divine 
Being, Who, though innocent, was willing to 
die and, if pain was necessary for deliverance, 
was prepared to endure it, was a story to which 
our men were ready to listen ; and thoughts of 
God learned therefrom were thoughts on which 
they were impelled to ponder. No hymn was 
sung more genuinely than, "When I Survey 
the Wondrous Cross." Especially that great 
verse which begins : 

"See from His head, His hands, His feet, 
Sorrow and love flow mingled down/' 
65 



66 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

was rendered in a spirit of wistful devotion 
that was quite unmistakable. I have heard 
a great audience, representing many regiments 
and types in our Army, singing it softly, un- 
accompanied, often with bent heads, as if it 
were too great a thing to be noisy about; and 
then coming, with a sudden impulse of reality, 
to the closing dedication: 

"Were the whole realm of nature mine 
That were an offering far too small." 

Many times that hymn has been sung by easy, 
half -asleep, congregations, in an atmosphere 
at sore variance with the self -loss of the words. 
But these lads were about to venture their 
lives ; if not for Christ, at least for what they 
believe to be right. And it adds something 
to such a hymn when, in it, morituri salutant. 



Now, there are some regions of Christian 
teaching in which men who have faced death 
in this war have direct contributions to make. 
For instance, upon certain aspects of the 
Christian ideal of conduct they have the right 



REDEMPTION 67 

to speak, and we have the duty to listen. But 
I do not think that we need expect them 
directly to teach us upon the subject of the 
Cross, except in so far as their own tragic ex- 
periences, and the manner in which they bear 
them, throw light on the mystery of deliver- 
ance through the suffering of the innocent. It 
is rather for Christian people, who have time 
and opportunity to meditate, to make a state- 
ment of what understanding they are reaching 
concerning the central fact of their faith 
through the spectacle of the pain of their de- 
fenders. And we may be confident that the 
closer we are brought to the facts of this war, 
the more we are flung back on the teaching 
of the Cross, unless we are to be without hope, 
and almost without God in the world. 

In Scripture, the Redeeming work of our 
Lord is presented to us in two aspects. On 
the one hand, it is objective — the paying of a 
debt, which we ourselves cannot pay: and on 
the other it is subjective — the recreating of our 
minds by the spectacle of love in pain because 
of us. About the latter of these there never 
has been any difficulty. If we permit the 
thought of our Lord, buffeted, scorned, spat 



68 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

upon, mocked again, enduring the scandal and 
the agony for the freeing of the race of which 
we are members, to grip our minds, then 
shame, gratitude and the response to the heroic 
combine to make us better men. But as re- 
gards the former, many had difficulty, and 
there can be no question that the teaching of 
blood shed for the remission of sins, and Life 
given as a ransom for many, was becoming an 
attenuated doctrine in the pulpits of Britain. 

II 

And now this war has broken upon us, and 
given us furiously to think. Certain facts are 
made plain. Chiefly, that evil committed in 
this world must be paid for: yes, and to the 
last farthing. The days in which men com- 
pass wrong pass away and are perished: but 
the evil that they do lives after them. The 
record of it is kept, and its consequences are 
cast most surely in somebody's teeth. The 
exceeding smallness of the grinding of the 
mills of God is a re-discovery of the days of 
our pain. If the hairs of our head are all 
numbered by our Heavenly Father, so are 



REDEMPTION 69 

the faintest quivers of our base desire by Him 
Who is righteous altogether. 

All of which is a just principle. "The 
oysters are eaten and put down in the bill," 
says somebody. And that applies to all life. 
Against such a rule no man can complain. 
It is fair dealing. But here we come up 
against another fact. The man that does the 
evil, or eats the oysters, is not always the 
man that pays. The fathers, not infre- 
quently, partake of sour grapes and thereby 
secure that the children's teeth are set on edge. 
And this strikes us as not quite so adequate 
to the situation. But the soldiers come to our 
aid : for they have discovered the fact, and con- 
tinually with startling cheerfulness assent to 
it, that we are bound up in the bundle of life ; 
that there is, if you prefer it, such a thing as 
the solidarity of the race: that God acts on 
the assumption that the human race is a family. 
And there is nothing revolting to the feeling, 
if one member of a family shall be ready to 
meet the obligations of his errant brother and 
set him on his feet again to play a man's part 
in the world. 



70 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



III 

In this war there is nothing plainer than 
that the burdens are unequally distributed, 
and that it is in the nature of things that such 
inequality must continue. A large number 
are at home — old folk, babies, invalids, muni- 
tion-workers, miners and those that govern; a 
large number are behind the lines — transport, 
Y. M. C. A. workers, and doctors in base hos- 
pitals; and in the actual front there stand the 
fighting men themselves, and especially the 
greatly-to-be-praised, but often half-forgot- 
ten, foot-slogging infantry, who go over the 
top, and encounter machine-gun nests, and 
die, and only grumble about the little things. 
On them the fist of war descends with its real 
savagery: they, together with the Navy and 
the Flying Men, endure its intimate hardness. 
But these things must needs be. Only a small 
proportion in modern war can know its final 
horror. The masses of men behind the lines 
are essential to ultimate victory: the non- 
combatant section left at home would only be 
a nuisance if they were poured into a front 



REDEMPTION 71 

line trench. The burden of the struggle is 
laid, of necessity, on the few, fit, strong and 
young, who are called and chosen, because of 
their strength and youth, for this high purpose. 

Now, there is a fact on which the minds of 
reflective soldiers fasten. Some are fit to bear 
the burden and to pay the debt, and some are 
not. Why that should be so, they cannot say. 
That it is so, they see with their own eyes. 
Consequently, a doctrine that speaks of the 
burden of a whole race being placed on the 
shoulders of One, because He is alone capable 
of supporting it, is in nowise strange to them. 
Far from that, it brings the divine nature close 
to them, if the divine makes assent to the same 
strange principle that is imposed on them. 

Our men might speak thus: "We are all 
one. If one suffers, another suffers; if one 
is ready to endure, he makes it better for the 
others. The world will never recover, unless 
some are ready to endure. But if some are 
thus willing, then good will come to the world. 
Let us be amongst those through whom good 
may come. Carry on." 



72 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



IV 

Now, out of such reflections as these, what 
thoughts come concerning the central fact of 
Christianity? This, first, that Christ, as the 
Elder Brother of the human family, identifies 
Himself with it, and, as such, pays its debt. 
And, thereby, He contributes to the ultimate 
redemption of the various members of the fam- 
ily. For it is only when a man can think that 
his debt is paid that he can stand up upon 
his feet and have that speech with God which 
makes him strong to live. We are willing to 
listen to theologians who will write for us upon 
the objective atonement. 

But, further, we are concerned that the 
Cross of Christ shall be made contemporane- 
ous. We have no doubt about Christ. He 
was a burden-bearer, the chosen amongst the 
chosen, the called amongst the called, pre- 
ordained before the foundation of the world — 
we can never question Him. He made the 
fullest assent that can be made to the principle 
that it is expedient that one should die for the 
people. His atoning death is clear to see. 



REDEMPTION 73 

But what about God? Does He sit in cold 
security in the eternal places, watching Jesus 
give His life for the world's peace, observing 
soldiers die with a smile because it is going to 
be "a better place for the kiddies afterwards," 
with His ineffable calm undisturbed and His 
heart untouched? If so, is God as divine as 
Jesus? It is a perplexity to the soldier mind. 
But I have seen these same soldiers lift their 
eyes and give strict attention when it was 
pointed out that the glory of God that shined 
in the face of Jesus Christ was precisely the 
glory of self -giving that Jesus showed on the 
Cross; and that the Cross is set eternally in 
the heart of the Most High. A message that 
it is the Crucified Christ that unfolds God to us 
is a message soldiers always listen to. They 
will worship a God Who is the supreme bur- 
den-bearer of the Universe. They will wor- 
ship, in short, the eternal Christ-in-God. But 
I doubt if they will worship any God but that. 



One further suggestion is worth pondering. 
If the Cross of Christ is the supreme unveiling 



74 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

of the heart of the Eternal, what is its relation 
to human sorrow as we know it? Does it 
illuminate man as well as God? I think it 
does — and in this way. 

It has been observed that mankind can be 
divided into two classes — and they are the 
only two that matter — the burden-bearers and 
the burden-creators. These are the real sheep 
and goats. And the worst of it is that all of 
us belong in some part to both sides. But 
some of us belong more to one side than to 
another; and thus settle our destinies. At 
any rate, we can distinguish the two classes 
sharply in idea. To the one belong all those 
who make life more difficult for their brethren, 
and make the enterprise of believing in Jesus 
Christ more severe; to the other, belong all 
those who ease the pains of their fellow-pil- 
grims. Profiteers, Kaisers, Graspers-after- 
Power, Seducers, Lustful Persons, and the 
merely pitiably selfish belong to the former 
class; Reformers, Martyrs, and women who 
bravely keep the home fires burning belong to 
the latter. And the latter bear the cross ; the 
former make its bearing necessary. Between 
the two classes the clash is definite. The one 



REDEMPTION 75 

works for God, and the other against Him. 
If a man decides to line his own pockets by 
paying a wage that makes it much more profit- 
able for his women employees to become pros- 
titutes he is a burden-creator; and somebody 
has to pay his bill to eternal justice. If a 
woman decides that she can do nothing to bet- 
ter herself, and that her life is hard, but that 
she is going to make the best home she knows 
how and keep smiling about it, she is a burden- 
bearer, and is "filling up that which is lacking 
of the sufferings of Christ." An amazing text 
that, which gives a great dignity to a consider- 
able number of Christian washer-women in 
Britain. Any innocent suffering, bravely 
borne, is a filling-up of that which is lacking. 
Any innocent sufferer, who endures suffering 
with courageous patience, is raised by Christ 
Himself into the proudest position in all the 
world — the position of a sharer in His Cross. 

Ah! it is true that none could bear the 
burden that He bore except Himself. His 
cup none could drink — not even the disciple 
who lay on His breast. But His Spirit could 
be in as many as believed on Him — and is 
shown a thousandfold on earth to-day, in sol- 



76 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

diers who dare death to bring a better world, 
in women who endure pain to keep a happ} r 
home for the children they bear. It is a great 
thing, the Cross of Christ. It illumines the 
heart of God, and makes humble people noble. 
And it stands as a constant appeal and chal- 
lenge to us all. Do we bear burdens or create 
them? As we can answer that question, we 
stand or fall at last. 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 



CHAPTER IV 
What Garrisons the Heart 

THERE is in the hearts of all men a sense 
of the Divine, dumb and sub-conscious, 
maybe, but there. The cry of the soul cannot 
be silenced, and that cry is for God. The 
question beside which all others pale into in- 
significance, is this : "Where can I find God?" 
Is His abode in the abysses of space? Is He 
infinite in the sense of being infinitely re- 
moved? If that be the case, we are left to our 
lonely struggle and to our orphaned state. 
The answer that Jesus Christ gives is this: 
"The kingdom of heaven is within you." God 
is to be found in the hidden depths of our own 
hearts. To find Him we have to sink the shaft 
into our own personalities. Not outside of us 
but within us we shall find the divine Ruler — 
the Source and End of life. 



79 



80 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



This is the great and culminating truth that 
Christianity revealed to men. It was only 
when the disciples realised this on the day of 
Pentecost that they understood the Master 
whom they had hitherto blindly followed. 
Until that hour of vision and inspiration they 
could make nothing of Jesus Christ; He was 
but a Rabbi with whom they ate and drank 
and whose words rilled them with wonder. Up 
to the last they thought only of His establish- 
ing an earthly kingdom, and they disputed as 
to who should have the thrones of greatest 
honour judging the tribes of Israel. Even 
when He returned from the shadow of death it 
was the same. The question which seemed to 
them the most urgent at the last was : "Wilt 
Thou at this time restore the kingdom to 
Israel?" A temporal kingdom based on 
legions seemed to them the only possible King- 
dom of God on earth. Had there been noth- 
ing beyond the Cross and the Resurrection, 
there would have been no Christianity upon 
earth to-day. 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 81 

In all great work there is the flash of in- 
spiration — the Spirit of God. The difference 
between the man who paints sign-boards and 
the artist who makes beauty live, is just that 
the one has been touched by the spirit of 
genius and the other not. It is, then, in no 
way strange to be told that religion has its 
source in the spirit of inspiration. It was 
when the disciples received the Spirit of God 
that they understood. They began by follow- 
ing a Rabbi, now their eyes saw clearly, and 
they recognised that He was God-filled. As 
they thought of Him they could not separate 
Him from God and the thought of God. 
What He was — love, purity, compassion, self- 
sacrifice — they felt that God must also be. 
And the Spirit of God that abode in Him now 
came and dwelt in them. The kingdom that 
He came to establish could no longer be 
thought of as a kingdom of this world. It was 
a kingdom invisible in the heart, transcending 
and including all the faculties of the will — a 
kingdom compared to which the empire of 
Ca?sar was but dust. It was when they real- 
ised this that there came to them the power 
that lifted them up above their weakness and 



82 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

their fears. Timorous peasants who were as 
quivering aspens, were transmuted into steel, 
and the Church moved out from behind closed 
doors and launched its great campaign for the 
conquest of the world. Only men who knew 
themselves to be the temples of God, the in- 
struments of His will, could have engaged on 
an enterprise such as that which was incon- 
ceivable except to Omnipotence. Thus, the 
conquering power of Christianity is the realisa- 
tion of the indwelling God. The bed-rock of 
the Church is the Holy Spirit. "God dwelleth 
in you" is religion's greatest word. 

II 

We sometimes shrink from all teaching re- 
garding the Holy Spirit, for the way of His 
working passes our understanding. But were 
we able to understand with mathematical pre- 
cision the ways of the Unseen, God would no 
longer be the supreme desire of our hearts for 
He would be finite like ourselves. "A God 
who is defined and definable is a God who has 
ceased to be." And the ways of that God 
Who is not one infinity but a multitude of 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 83 

infinities, must be beyond the grasp of our 
minds. It is by a faculty deeper than reason, 
through the moving of the Spirit in the depths 
of our sub-conscious self, that we know that 
He is and that we are not alone. 

Though we cannot hope, while we are yet 
imprisoned in the body of sense, to comprehend 
the ways of God, there are yet many things 
regarding the Holy Spirit which, if we con- 
sider them, will bring the manner of His work- 
ing out of the region of the super-normal into 
that of every-day experience. When we read 
of the day of Pentecost we are apt to be re- 
pelled as if we were reading a tale of some 
superheated imagination. It seems alien to 
all we know — nebulous, mythical, and abnor- 
mal. But it is not a tale that sprang from 
neurotic minds. The revelation of the in- 
dwelling God that then flashed on the souls of 
men is in line with the normal growth of human 
knowledge and power. 

For it was not a new power that was then 
brought for the first time to bear upon men. 
The Holy Spirit had ever been with men, striv- 
ing with them, flashing revelation on the soul 
of prophets and seers, and moving the hearts 



84 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

of men to seek after God. What happened 
was that the fullness of His power was re- 
vealed and the hearts of men were brought 
into unison with God. It happened then as 
has happened with all the power of God which 
men have been unable to use until the hour of 
revelation came. The world quivered from 
the beginning with the power of electricity, but 
men only shrank with terror before it as they 
heard the rumbling of heaven's artillery and 
saw the flash of the lightning that smote and 
killed. But at last a day came when the secret 
of that power was flashed on the mind of Fara- 
day and its laws were discovered. And then 
that power which hitherto was unused and 
valueless became the servant of man. Cities 
were ere long illumined by it and messages 
flashed round the world. In the spiritual 
world that, also, was what happened when 
Jesus Christ revealed to men the working of 
the Holy Spirit. He took the veil from off 
the face of God's spiritual energy. He was 
the discoverer of the laws of the soul. He 
established a contact between the soul and God, 
so that through prayer and the ordinances of 
the Church, the energy of God was communi- 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 85 

cated to men. The power that aforetime was 
available only for the great souls that saw the 
vision, became now the possession of all who 
would receive. Peasants and slaves, shep- 
herds and toilers in the mines, were so brought 
into touch with God that they were lifted out 
of themselves. Though they were but the 
servants of the will of others ere this great 
experience came, now they essayed tasks that 
were previously unthinkable. The power in 
which they confronted every task was the spirit 
that enabled them to say: "We are not the 
hirelings of men; we are the sons of God." 
It is true of religion as of all things, that noth- 
ing of worth can ever be done without inspira- 
tion. "Nothing great in science," wrote Hux- 
ley, "has ever been done by men, whatever 
their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the 
truth-seeker was wanting." There is nothing 
more mysterious about the Holy Spirit than 
there is about the sources of "Paradise Lost." 

Ill 

In nothing was the working of the Holy 
Spirit more remarkable than in the courage 



86 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

that He inspired in the hearts of these men. 
There came to these early Christians a power 
that transformed them. They who formerly 
cowered before authority now confronted op- 
position without a tremor. "We must obey 
God rather than men" was the new voice of 
defiance on their lips. And that has been 
one of the great fruits of the Spirit of God in 
all ages. In the hearts of Christians the Spirit 
of God has inspired a courage that never 
failed. 

We can realise this great fruit of the Spirit 
when we consider the way in which Jesus Christ 
confronted the world. On Him the Spirit of 
God descended in fullness of power and the 
fruit of the Spirit was courage. If His gen- 
tleness be the wonder of history, yet that face 
that could melt with tenderness was, when 
the need arose, set like a flint. He manifested 
His courage in defying the conventions of His 
day. The good man could not then consort 
with publicans and sinners, but He defied the 
canons of His day and He sat down with the 
outcasts at the feast of life. Any man can 
stand up to his enemies; the proof of courage 
is when a man can stand up to his friends. 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 87 

This was what He did. When His friends 
tried to force on Him an earthly kingdom He 
defied them, though the defiance meant their 
leaving Him solitary. It needs true courage 
to deliberately disperse one's followers, and to 
silence their hosannas. When He faced His 
enemies His voice never faltered as He de- 
clared the judgment of God: "Woe unto 
you Scribes and Pharisees." When the end 
drew near He set His face steadfastly to go to 
Jerusalem, and He strode toward the Cross 
with His disciples lagging behind, their opposi- 
tion awed into silence by the light of uncon- 
querable resolve shining in His eyes. He 
meets His appointed end with head erect, re- 
fusing to abate His claims. Though witness- 
ing to the truth meant the Cross, He bore His 
witness to the end. Jesus Christ is the em- 
bodiment of that courage that dies for the dif- 
ference between right and wrong. And what 
He was in the world, His followers have been 
in the world. 

When the Holy Spirit came to His disciples 
they were endued with the same high courage. 
They, too, defied death, and sang the song of 
victory amid the flames. All ages are aglow 



88 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

with this fruit of the Spirit. "Be strong, 
Polycarp, and play the man," was the cry of a 
Christian to the aged saint in the day of his 
trial. "Eighty-six years have I served 
Christ," answered Polycarp to his judge, "and 
He has never wronged me, how can I now 
speak evil of my King and Saviour?" And so 
he died. Our hearts still thrill as we read the 
words of Ignatius on his way to his martyr- 
dom: "Come fire and cross; come crowds of 
wild beasts; come tearings and manglings; 
wracking of bones and hacking of limbs ; come 
cruel tortures of the devil, only let me attain 
to Jesus Christ." It has ever been the same. 
The conquests of Christianity have ever been 
through men to whom Jesus Christ has ap- 
pealed on the side of their strength, and whose 
hearts His Spirit has fired with high resolve. 
The Christian army is not an ambulance corps 
but a storming battalion. 

To picture Jesus Christ as the "meek and 
suffering Saviour" as Mr. Wells has portrayed 
Him is to be ignorant of what He really was 
and is. If Christianity were only submission, 
there would have been no Christianity. If 
Jesus Christ had ended His work in the self- 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 89 

sacrifice of the Cross there would have been 
no Church. Christianity has conquered thus 
far because Jesus Christ has breathed into men 
the living, ardent, venturesome, self-sacrific- 
ing spirit that scorns death and laughs at dan- 
ger. By ever refusing to submit to evil, by 
ever fighting against wrong, Christianity has 
won its triumphs. The fruit of the Spirit is 
not submission to men, it is submission to God, 
and an undaunted courage that defies men. 

IV 

In our day the spirit of courage has fired 
the hearts of men with an ardour that has 
endured misery such as the world has never 
seen. The virtue which the soldier prizes most 
is this virtue of courage. But often he is only 
dimly conscious that courage is the fruit of the 
Spirit of God. 

In the twilight of a Sunday evening a 
wounded soldier began to talk to his neighbour 
lying near him of this. And what he said of 
his own experiences may be taken as represen- 
tative of what multitudes have experienced in 
these days. 



90 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

"Every man," said the soldier, "knows his 
own experience best. When my time came, 
I was in a blue funk. We were to go over 
the parapet in an hour. The guns rent the air 
into shreds and the earth into shards. The 
world was convulsed with crumbling earth and 
splintered shell. On the men in the trench 
there fell a stillness. Through the roar as of 
a world passing away two or three slept peace- 
fully. Their accounts with the Unseen were 
perhaps already balanced or they did not know 
of any account. But the rest were still. 
When the barrage lifted in front and went on, 
they had to leap into the open and follow. . . . 
Each man knew what his chance was worth, 
and each in the secret of his soul called upon 
his God. . . . And, though I am not a re- 
ligious man, I tried hard to visualise God, as 
I prayed. I did not ask for safety or for 
my life, for that seemed to me unfair. One 
must play the game. But I prayed for what 
I needed most. I prayed for courage. I 
looked at the men and it gripped my soul that 
I might fail them. I had only one word ris- 
ing in the stillness of the soul: — 'Courage; 
Lord! give me courage.' But my lips were 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 91 

ashen, and the courage I asked for came not. 
The minutes were passing, and I quailed. 
Was fear to conquer me? My heart cowered 
with the fear of fear. 

"Then, like a pistol shot, sudden and sharp, 
a thought came to me. I changed my prayer. 
I asked no longer for courage; I asked only 
to be delivered from the fear of fear. If only 
I were set free from the terror of becoming a 
coward I might prove my manhood. 'Save 
me from the fear of being afraid,' was now my 
prayer. And a wonderful thing happened. 
I felt all at once a sense of an Unseen Power, 
in whose hand I was. There rang in my ears 
words which I once knew but had forgotten : — 
'My Grace is sufficient for thee.' Like the 
snapping of a string that opens a door I was 
set free — as a bird from the snare of a fowler. 
The barrage, continuing or lifting, was nothing 
to me. Suddenly the guns ceased; there was 
a silence as of death, and we went over the 
parapet. But it was not the man of an hour 
ago, but a new and different man, that went 
over the parapet in my person." 

This is only the experience of multitudes in 
the hour of their trial. In the face of over- 



92 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

whelming difficulties, when heart and flesh 
fail, a door opens in the sub-conscious self, and 
the heart is filled with the might of the in- 
dwelling God. It was to that God in his heart 
that the soldier made his appeal; and he real- 
ised the might of the Holy Spirit in the fortify- 
ing of his will. The same officer narrated 
another and similar experience: 

"We were moving up a communication 
trench to support another regiment. The 
trench had been pounded by our artillery and 
then by the Boche until it was scarcely a trench 
at all. In it were many dead, both theirs 
and ours. Everybody was too busy to bury 
them, almost too busy to notice them. In 
time you get callous — you've got to. The 
Boche began to shell heavily with a high ex- 
plosive — 'whizbangs' (a most annoying shell) 
— and machine guns from various points swept 
the trench. You can stand anything if you 
are on the move, but a stoppage occurred in 
front, and we had to halt. The trench was 
overcrowded. Death was everywhere — under 
the feet the putrefying dead, and in the air 
and all around, death. And then the barrage 
settled down on the part of the trench where I 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 93 

was. It was horrible. It wasn't my first ex- 
perience — but it was by far the worst. And 
you never get used to that hell. 

"It was then that my queer experience 
came. I happened to look into the face of a 
brother officer (a white man if ever there was 
one), and, with more bravado than merriment, 
I screwed my lips into what I hoped was a 
smile. And in that act there arose within me 
an unconscious appeal to the Highest. That 
appeal was urgent. Though I am not a 
religious man I believe certain things — the 
things that matter. My appeal was that the 
Power over all and within me should back me 
up in the effort that produced that smile. 
Instantly something happened. . . . Shells 
still burst all around, with smoke and an in- 
credible roar everywhere. The crack, crack 
of machine guns until the air was a sheet of 
bullets ; the earth blasted and thrown high into 
the air — that was what girt me around. But 
these things were no longer real. As a 
dreamer awakes from a ghastly nightmare, 
and, while the horror is still upon him, is sud- 
denly comforted by the knowledge that it was 
only a dream, so, all at once, the danger and 



94 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

horror of the trench became unreal. I was 
the reality. I could not be destroyed. I was 
filled with a great comfort. During these few 
moments (that probably did not last much 
longer than I smiled) I was raised above de- 
struction. ... It made a great difference to 
me." 

What enables men to face horrors such as 
were never faced on earth before is the un- 
daunted courage that God inspires in the heart. 
This is the dumb, unconscious religion of every 
soldier. In the great crisis the heart is gar- 
risoned by God. Kipling expresses the same 
truth in the words he puts into the lips of an 
Indian soldier: — "Fighting goes on in the 
sky, on earth, and under the earth. Such a 
fighting is rarely vouchsafed anyone to be- 
hold. Yet, if one reflects upon God it is no 
more than rain on a roof." When the soul is 
endued with the consciousness of God, so that 
the human will becomes the instrument of the 
Divine will, then the soul is master. "Trem- 
blest thou, O my body," said Turenne, as he 
quivered on the eve of conflict; "if thou but 
knewest the dangers into which I shall carry 
thee to-day, thou wouldst tremble still more." 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 95 

And that is the victory of Christianity; the 
triumph of the spirit over the flesh. Never 
was that victory achieved in the measure in 
which our eyes behold it. Victory is of God 
because the spirit of courage and self-sacri- 
fice is of God. 



In the realisation of the presence of God in 
the heart there is to be found not only the 
source of courage but of all power. What 
man needs, above all, is power to do the right 
— to be righteous. There comes to us again 
and again the vision of the right; we have 
behind us a heredity that has fought for the 
right; there is in us the witness of conscience 
to the right; the atmosphere in which we were 
reared is an atmosphere impregnated with 
ideals of right ; and when we come face to face 
with Jesus Christ we cannot but confess that 
He is the right. But what we lack is the 
power to do the right. We may as well be 
told to clasp the stars because we see them, 
as to do the right because we see it. 

It is here that Christianity in the fullness of 



96 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

its power meets our dire need. It brings the 
revelation of the perfect life in Jesus Christ — 
a revelation that would only fill us with de- 
spair if there were nothing but a revelation. 
But Christianity does more. It brings the 
power wherewith we can realise in our hearts 
and lives that perfect ideal. Through the 
spirit of inspiration there comes the power 
to live and act. All the faculties of mind and 
will are quickened. When the heart receives 
that power, then the man arises and sets him 
to fight. The evil within him and the evil 
without him, he tramples under his feet. He 
is no longer as a ship becalmed, helpless, and 
borne by every tide whither it would not; he 
is now as a ship with full-spread sails, in the 
track of the trade-winds, steering straight to 
her port. This is the testimony of every soul 
that has ventured upon God : "I live, yet not 
I but Christ liveth in me." When we can say 
that, we have entered on the fullness of the 
Christian heritage. The spiritual forces are 
within us working out truth and righteousness, 
purity of heart and cleanness of speech. We 
are each, so far as in us lies, making the world 
righteous. 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 97 

So far, then, from Christianity being sub- 
mission, quietness, or passive endurance, it is 
dynamic force working out righteousness in 
the midst of the world's evil. If Christianity 
were really submission it never could appeal 
to the heroic. The young manhood of the 
world will be captured by the dynamics and 
not by the mechanics of religion. It will be 
in the future as it was in the past. "How 
did Christianity arise and spread among men?" 
asked Carlyle; "was it by well arranged sys- 
tems of mechanics? Not so! It came in the 
mystic deeps of man's soul, and was spread 
abroad by the preaching of the Word by 
simple, altogether natural and individual 
effort." When again we shall apprehend God 
in the mystic deep of our hearts, when we un- 
derstand and realise the words, "Receive ye 
the Holy Ghost," then will Christianity again 
arise and conquer. For men will be once 
more endued with power. 

VI 

In the midst of a conflict waged by material 
forces it is difficult to realise that we are really 



98 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



waging a spiritual warfare, and that the ulti- 
mate issue depends on the soul. And yet, if 
we but think, we shall find it to be so. 

The power that enabled us, all unprepared, 
to rush into the breach, and through the sac- 
rificing of our blood to save France, was the 
power of the soul. When those who were 
pledged to protect Belgium trampled her 
underfoot, we rushed to her help just because 
we felt that truth and righteousness impelled 
us, and ever since then our dead have been to 
us martyrs in a righteous war. It was for the 
Christian ideal that we drew the sword. It 
was a spiritual power that impelled us to war 
against brutality and the ideal of Odin. 

The war is being gained by spiritual forces. 
Doubtless the blockade of Germany's coasts 
is strangling her vitality; but there is a more 
terrible blockade — an isolation more asphyxi- 
ating. And that all-destroying isolation is the 
manner in which Germany has isolated herself 
from all the moral and spiritual ideals that 
enrich the life of nations. Nation after nation 
have seen the ideal of righteousness arise before 
their unveiled eyes, and have cut themselves 
off from fellowship with her. To be isolated 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 99 

from the ideals of freedom and justice — that 
truly is death. And the armaments of the 
world that are being steadily massed for the 
final destruction of the evil that threatened 
the world's soul are only the instruments 
wherewith the outraged soul of the nations is to 
execute final judgment. When Germany de- 
fied the spiritual power that works righteous- 
ness in the universe, she doomed herself to 
destruction. 

All the forces that are now converging for 
the destruction of the power that trampled on 
truth, are at the core spiritual. It looks as if 
everything turned on shells and machine guns. 
But the shells and guns are only materialised 
spirit. For what turns the iron and the ex- 
plosives into shells is the spirit of the people. 
The materials are there; the question is — can 
these materials be turned into munitions fast 
enough to save the world? The heart of the 
nation has answered the question. Men and 
women converted their life-blood into muni- 
tions. In the piled-up munition dumps we 
can see the spirit of a nation — its very soul in- 
carnate in iron. Shells are a product of the 
Spirit, and the war is being decided by spirit- 



100 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

ual forces. Behind everything, through every- 
thing, is the power of the Spirit. And that 
is how the issue is sure. For these ideals from 
which the armies of freedom draw their deter- 
mination to conquer, are for ever being re- 
newed by the very life of God — by every 
breath of His Spirit. 

VII 

If the European civilisation which has been 
passing in the smoke of the howitzer guns for 
these three years is not at last to be utterly 
destroyed, the soul of the nations has to be 
re-enforced. And that can only be done by 
the Spirit of God filling the hearts of men. 

Let any man consider the miserable con- 
dition to which the world has been reduced and 
he will realise that there is only one way of 
salvation, and that is through the soul. We 
have come to the day of ruin because men were 
seized by the obsession that human progress 
lay along the road of brain development. 
They set themselves to conquer the forces of 
nature, and in conquering deemed themselves 
gods. But their conquests are now turned into 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 101 

instruments of destruction and the world has 
become Aceldama. We conquered the air, 
and lo! death and destruction are rained upon 
cities; the joyous laughter of children is turned 
into cries of* despair and innocent babes into 
mangled heaps. Let men continue along this 
road, and as we contemplate the ultimate end 
of this merciless and bloody tyranny we have 
created for ourselves, we can only gasp with 
horror. We can foresee capital cities laid in 
ruins with the shrines of God given over to 
the bats, and the remnant of the people cower- 
ing in cellars and sewers. We conquered the 
depths of the sea, only to hear the moans of 
drowning women and children as great ships 
sink into darkness. The highways of the sea 
have become the ways of death, and we con- 
jured from the vasty deep the spectre of hol- 
low-eyed famine. We conquered gravitation, 
sending our high explosive shells hurtling over 
twenty miles, and behold even the bowels of 
the earth and the deep dug-outs are no longer 
a safety for men driven to burrow under- 
ground. We have come to this, that man is 
being mangled and annihilated by his own in- 
ventions; each triumph over the forces of na- 



102 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

ture is another step towards his ruin. Not 
long ago our walls were eloquent with placards 
beseeching us to avoid extravagance of dress. 
These placards glowed with patriotic vision. 
They must have been issued by men who had 
experienced a moment of self -revelation in 
which they realised that sackcloth and ashes 
are the only raiment befitting human beings 
that have allowed themselves to be conquered 
by their conquests. 

There can only be one deliverance from the 
tyranny we have created for ourselves, and 
that is through the soul. Deliverance will 
come when humanity has learned the lesson 
that the development of material power with- 
out the development of soul to control it, can 
only bring misery to men. That is the les- 
son we are slow to learn. There is little sign 
of our statesmen and politicians being even 
willing to learn it. They plan plans for the 
future, but there is no word of the soul. They 
propose to usher in the millennium with an 
Education Bill that adds a hundred or two 
more hours to the annual period of teaching. 
We are to be saved by more brain develop- 
ment, by a little more of that science that has 



WHAT GARRISONS THE HEART 103 

blessed the world with poison gas ! And there 
is never so much as a hint of God and the soul ! 
They are to put an end to war by treaties 
and signatures on parchment, and typewriters, 
and they never realise that treaties mean noth- 
ing unless the persons who sign them have a 
soul alit with loyalty to the truth. How the 
angels must weep over man in his self-made 
blindness. 

Power such as man has now developed can 
only mean ruin, so long as that power is in 
the hands of hatred, jealousy, greed and ambi- 
tion. Well may the world tremble for the 
future, as it sees the instruments of destruc- 
tion multiply in these hands. But there is a 
hand that can be trusted to wield that power, 
and that hand is the hand of love. For in love 
there are no boundaries and no kingdoms, and 
no alien races. Love never ravishes or dev- 
astates or destroys. The love that is Chris- 
tianity knows neither Jew nor Greek, Briton 
nor German. In that love we all are brothers. 
The only possible way of salvation lies through 
the world receiving the gospel of love, and sub- 
mitting to its law. Then that power which in 
the hand of hatred has strewn the world with 



104 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

wreckage, will pour healing and help and 
loveliness upon the w T eary and heavy-laden — 
will usher in the morn of God. 

And there is only one way to that blessed 
consummation. It is that which multitudes 
of Christians have experienced : even "the love 
of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy 
Ghost which is given unto us." When the 
world will turn to God and seek after that 
Spirit — the morning of its deliverance shall 
dawn. And it will not dawn till then. And 
the glorious thing about it all is this — that 
whereas no coinage can buy the inspiration 
of genius or the sense of beauty, or the vision 
and faculty of the seer, yet this, the greatest 
of all, the inspiration of goodness, the power 
that can turn sinners into saints, is given free 
to all who ask. The words of the Master are 
sure: "Ask and it shall be given you." If 
we are visited by no rapture, and know no 
power, it is because we do not ask. 



THE GOOD MAN 



CHAPTER V 
The Good Man 

VOICES were not wanting even in the 
days before the war, warning Christian 
teachers that they were doing damage to their 
own side by misrepresentations of the Chris- 
tian ideal. A standard was set up, which, it 
was alleged, was too negative, too bloodless, 
too safe. Respectability in its narrower as- 
pects was over-worshipped; and the conven- 
tional was too much with us. The sample 
Christian was one who took few risks, even in 
the cause of the kingdom of God: boyhood 
itself was suspect, if it displayed over-rashly 
the kind of nerve that "walks along awfully 
high walls and likes it." The Christian en- 
terprise was regarded as one of yielding not to 
temptation, rather than as one of laying hold on 
life. An unpleasant likeness developed be- 
tween Kipling's "Tomlinson" and the most 
suitable candidate for office in a Christian 
church. Virtue was not made that dazzling, 

107 



108 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

alluring, daring thing, which it ought to be if 
it is to win adherence from ardent spirits. 
And, especially, it was too individual. Men 
were concerned overmuch with a saving of their 
own souls, which meant no more than securing 
escape from sin's penalties; and the kind of 
man who could say that he almost had for- 
gotten that he had a soul, so concentrated was 
he on some great cause, was looked at askance. 

Whether these, and similar, criticisms had 
much body in them is hard to say. It is almost 
as impossible to bring an indictment against 
a Church, or an age, as against a nation. It 
has always to be remembered that the Vic- 
torian epoch, which is supposed to be the 
supreme period in which smug primness, leav- 
ened with a good deal of hypocrisy, was re- 
garded as the apex of human goodness, was 
the time that saw the full development of the 
missionary spirit, that produced men of the 
stamp of David Livingstone, and that dis- 
played the rise of that social conscience which 
urged the Church to tackle, in quite a new 
way, the problem of poverty. 

At the same time, there has been enough 
truth in the criticisms to make us turn to our 



THE GOOD MAN 109 

soldiery and to try to learn from them some- 
thing of what goodness means. What we 
need to be educated in is the proportion of the 
ideal character, and the relative emphasis 
which we should use in setting forth the vari- 
ous aspects of virtue. That we have much to 
learn on such points as these from men so 
greatly tempted and tried as soldiers are, surely 
no man can be found to deny. 



From time to time great attempts have been 
made by the Church to give concrete expression 
to its idea of the good man. And all of them 
have had some of the light of truth in them, 
which we can only neglect at our peril. The 
ascetic ideal, for instance, though it contained 
within itself dangers of a grave kind, em- 
phasised a fact which the world must never 
forget, that humanity in its upward movement 
is engaged in a grim struggle between flesh 
and spirit. No Christian system will last long, 
which banishes asceticism from its practice. 
Protestant as well as Roman must hold the 
body in hand. But, in its historical forms it 



110 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

proved its weakness in its excuses, and seemed 
to forget that a perfect human being should 
possess a perfect body, which is not the enemy 
but the servant of his spirit. Meredith, a great 
hater of excessive asceticism, taught us wisely 
when he taught us that we are tripartite — 
"blood and brain and spirit we"; and a system 
which neglects that fact ultimately turns out 
not elevated human beings, but verminous 
fakirs, who lacerate the work of God's hands 
in their own frame, so fearfully and wonder- 
fully made, in order to please Him. Puri- 
tanism, which developed a Protestant ascetic 
principle, showed, after the living fires in its 
soul had become smouldering, similar danger- 
ous tendencies, which produced their own re- 
action. "I do not consider Puritanism mis- 
taken; I consider it morally wicked," engag- 
ingly remarked a High Church chaplain to a 
gathering of clergy and ministers recently in 
France — a feat in hyperbole which provoked 
smiles. Yet it was easy enough to understand 
what he was after. Ethical standards, which 
deny the body its place as a part of man, 
or refuse to acknowledge that the God of the 
Sunset is a God in whose heart beauty dwells, 



THE GOOD MAN 111 

and that He has given us these things richly to 
enjoy, can never be final. 

Nevertheless, the truths that they taught by 
exaggeration shall endure. The man who is 
the slave of appetite can never present himself 
as a representative of goodness, however heroic 
and unselfish he may be. And nobody admits, 
and even insists on, this more clearly than the 
soldier. Not that he is an ascetic. The truth 
is far otherwise. War is not a school in which 
asceticism grows. In the actual conduct of 
warfare, owing to discipline and the need for a 
clear brain and vigorous frame, restraint is no 
doubt generally exercised. But when the 
strain is off, jangled nerves play into the hands 
of the subtle perils of reaction. Probably, 
too, many of the finer feelings are temporarily 
blunted; and, in any case, the conditions of 
life are so unnatural — monastic, without the 
religious impulse of monasticism — that temp- 
tation is luridly strong. Not many can realise 
the difference that it makes to young men to 
be bereft of the society of their own women- 
kind. The gracious influences of home — of 
mother, sister, lover or little child — are most 
potent defenders in the sore battle for self- 



112 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

mastery. War inevitably means their re- 
moval; and those who are censorious should 
remember what such deprivation means. 
Consequently, although there are countless 
instances of very noble adherence to ancient 
standard, we need not expect to find the ascetic 
note conspicuously strong amongst men for 
whom life is so hard. 

But you will not find amongst soldiers much 
encouragement for the idea that control of 
appetite is not part of the ideal. On the con- 
trary, it is remarkable to discover how highly 
the mastery of the flesh is respected. Here 
and there, in the Army as out of it, men 
may be met with who "sit in the seat of the 
scorner," and deride what they call the ethics 
of the vicarage ; but they are rarer than might 
be imagined. For the most part, our men 
have a high thought of purity, and are quite 
certain that a worthy religious life cannot be 
maintained without it. A curious fact is the 
lofty standard in the direction of self-control 
which they demand from chaplains. The most 
typical "old soldier," with a possibly highly 
coloured record, will become a severe critic of 
a padre who fails to set an example in these 



THE GOOD MAN 113 

matters. An acute observer remarked that 
this universal attitude is due to an appreciation 
of metier. A soldier's business is to be brave; 
a solicitor's to be trustworthy; and a clergy- 
man's to be good. And inasmuch as self-mas- 
tery is an essential element in goodness, it is 
demanded of the chaplain. The fact of the de- 
mand indicates the depth of the appreciation 
that goodness is not achieved without this 
faculty. Perhaps, too, their wistful desire to 
achieve it for themselves makes them demand 
that the official representatives of religion shall 
prove in practice that its achievement is pos- 
sible. A failure by the chaplains may do 
something to dim a half-understood hope. 
However, the fact is there; and from it we 
may at least infer that the standards of private 
life, common to all branches of the Church, and 
to all Christian times, will not be deposed, as 
ideals, by the men who bear arms. 



II 



But we may learn more directly from them 
and their actual conduct, than from the ideals 
which we may infer from the standards which 



114 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

they set for others. In two directions, soldiers 
have helped to restore balance to the presenta- 
tion of the Christian standard. They have 
brought back courage to its proper place ; and 
they have helped us to realise anew the 
supreme splendour of selflessness. 

It is almost tautological to say that our men 
in the field are brave. The story of war, and 
not least of this war, is sinister enough; but 
its gloom has been irradiated by gleams of 
purest heroism. Not a day passes, we may 
believe, but some man, in whose soul we would 
never have discerned a while ago the shining 
of the knightly flame, displays that love, than 
which no man hath greater, by giving up his 
life for his friend. And daring, great as that 
ever shown by a knight of any Round Table, 
or by the fearless sea-rovers of the spacious 
days, is the continuous spectacle offered to the 
world by those amazing lads whose element is 
the air. There is nothing from which no good 
comes. Even the hammer of war, as it breaks 
and splinters, uncovers veins of purest gold. 

How much of the ordinary bravery of a man 
in the battle-line is due to the effect of the 
crowd in which he is one, we cannot say; all 



THE GOOD MAN 115 

that we know is that it is manifested plain for 
any one to see, and that there are innumerable 
instances of the two o'clock in the morning 
sort, performed in darkness and in solitude. 
There is scarcely a stain on Britain's shield 
here. Some of it, no doubt, is native ; the same 
deed may have different moral values when 
performed by different men. Some wonder- 
fully constructed natures find not only their 
courage, but their capacity for quick decisions 
and competent action, rise with danger. But 
a vast deal of it is a doggedly determined cour- 
age, the peculiar possession and distinction of 
men w T ho are mortally afraid. But if to be 
"feared of a thing and yet to do it is what 
makes the prettiest kind of a man," there are 
several hundreds of thousands of very pretty 
men in the British Army. 

Now, this quality must be restored to its 
proper place in the presentation of the ideal 
character by Christian people. In returning 
to an emphasis upon courage — such as was 
given in the periods of chivalry — we are only 
reverting to an accurate portrayal of the char- 
acter of our Lord. Some one has related that 
a Japanese General was given the Gospels to 



116 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

read for the first time, and after he had perused 
them, he was asked what was the quality in 
Jesus Christ that struck him most. "His 
bravery" was the reply. It is not, perhaps, 
the most usual judgment; but there are in- 
stances and to spare in our Lord's life that 
give it point. For it was He who set His 
face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem. The 
knowledge of what was likely to happen was 
clear in His mind. Even the disciples were 
alive to the danger, and with importunate en- 
treaty strove to dissuade Him. But He had 
made up His mind whither duty called; and, 
if danger called too, He was content. The 
hatred of Him by the higher orders was well 
known, as was also their lack of scruple in 
achieving their ends. They were led by a 
strong, determined man in the person of 
Caiaphas — the real villain of the piece — and 
imagination could easily paint in sombre 
colours what would happen if he got his way. 
In point of fact, the Agony, the Scourging and 
the Cross did happen; nevertheless, with the 
shadow of them all upon Him, He set His face 
steadfastly to the point of peril. What cour- 






THE GOOD MAN 117 

age is greater than the courage of the Captain 
of the Host? 

And during all His life, He had been dis- 
plajang the same quality at its height. Often 
instances of it creep into the Gospel records 
almost inadvertently. There is no parade of 
it. It merely inevitably displays itself as the 
record of His life is unfolded. For instance, 
there is the occasion when He boldly faced 
religious prejudice through loyalty to the truth 
as He saw it. When the disciples plucked the 
corn, half-unconsciously, as they passed 
through the fields on the Sabbath day, they 
offended the Pharisaic rules in the most un- 
questionable manner. Every device which the 
mis-spent ingenuity of the Scribes could dis- 
cover had been utilised to fence in the formal 
sanctity of the day. Its outward observance 
had become as rigid and as unspiritual as men 
could make it. The observance of the rules 
was as prevalent as spiritual use of it seems to 
have been rare. A religious prejudice had 
gathered round it of the most formidable kind ; 
and such a prejudice can become the most re- 
lentless and bitter of enemies. But our Lord, 



118 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

with no hesitation at all, faced it. And His 
immortal sentence "the Sabbath was made for 
man, not man for the Sabbath," was one of the 
bravest replies ever given to the narrow- 
minded for the sake of truth. 

Nor was prejudice the only foe He encoun- 
tered. He dealt with vested interests in the 
same high, heroic spirit. The two most cer- 
tain ways of arousing the spirits of cruelty and 
revenge are just these — to strike at the preju- 
dices which men mistake for convictions and to 
affect their pockets in the name of righteous- 
ness. But when our Lord dealt with the chat- 
tering crowds in the precincts of the Temple, 
He attacked the latter, as in the corn-fields He 
had attacked the former. He was in the midst 
of danger sufficient already one might have 
thought. The plottings that resulted in His 
death were already in full swing. But here 
was duty to be done; the real sanctity of the 
Father's house was to be defended. The 
spirit of reverence was to be regenerated. 
Wherefore, He cleansed the Temple. 

Such instances make it clear enough why 
the Japanese General gave the answer that he 
did. Our Lord did His duty, at whatever 



THE GOOD MAN 119 

cost in personal risk. And, in as far as that 
statement can be made about our men to-day, 
though the circumstances are so different, they 
are helping to bring back a quality, the splen- 
dour of which had been half-forgotten, to its 
rightful position of dignity in our thought of 
what a good man should be. 

But courage moves upward to a virtue 
nobler still. For courage at its highest 
merges into fortitude, which is a mark of na- 
tures that are noble indeed. Botticelli, seen 
through Ruskin's eyes, has the right way of it, 
when he paints his figure representing this vir- 
tue, not in the guise of some proud warrior, 
ardent for the fray, but as one who is weary, 
who will rejoice greatly when the word comes 
to disarm for the long day's work is done, but 
whose hand, nevertheless, again will resolutely 
clasp the sword-hilt, and whose spirit again 
will shake itself free from its fatigue, if the 
bugle calls to battle. After this manner, in 
amazing measure, are our soldiery. Their en- 
durance, their purposeful good cheer, their 
absurd habits of grumbling about everything 
that is of no moment and thereby keeping their 
minds off the trials that might unnerve them, 



120 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

their grim will to carry on — these are the facts 
that again and again impress the observer, and 
bring to his lips, as a humble and sincere ex- 
pression of his thought, the words : 

"By the living God that made you 
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Dhin!" 

And here it is that our defenders have a 
word for the Church. Days are coming when 
Christian fortitude will be tested — stern days 
after the war, when Christian principles must 
be enunciated, as reconstructions of our shat- 
tered society come to be attempted. We need 
not imagine that even the war will secure for 
us that the spirit of the world will yield without 
bitter struggles to the Spirit of Christ in our 
social life. The Church will need all the cour- 
age she can find, if she is to play her proper 
part in securing for the world the good that 
may be latent in all this pain. She must seek 
it earnestly, as a jewel of great price; and en- 
deavour to secure that those who have dis- 
played it so conspicuously in war, shall dedi- 
cate their power of endurance to the victorious 
issue of the strife in which she is engaged. To 
that end, she must make it clear that her ideal 



THE GOOD MAN 121 

man is one who possesses it. After all, the 
older teachers of the Church assumed fortitude 
as a virtue in a Christian. Before the specific- 
ally Christian graces of faith, hope and charity 
were manifest in a character, the "natural," or 
"rational," virtues of Temperance, Prudence, 
Justice and Fortitude were taken for granted. 
We must get back to Aquinas and to Dante 
here, and by example as well as by precept 
prove that the Christian is one who, even in the 
midst of fears, is able to endure unto the end. 



Ill 



Some months ago, the present writer hap- 
pened to have occasion to take his walks 
abroad on a somewhat dismal French road. 
The usual mud abounded, and a rain was de- 
scending which would have done credit to the 
Hebrides. At the side of the road a military 
waggon was drawn up, and upon it two men 
seemed to be engaged in violent altercation. 
A nearer inspection proved that one of them 
had lost his overcoat and was, apparently,, shiv- 
ering and unwell. His friend was searching 
the outlying regions of a soldier's vocabulary 



122 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

— regions more vivid than refined — to describe 
the folly the other had displayed in mislaying 
so useful a garment on such a day ; and ended 
his tirade by saying, " 'Ere — put my coat on." 
With the hands of compulsion he forced his 
companion to take the covering and himself 
proceeded to get wet, the while he chanted his 
desire that some one should take him home to 
dear old Blighty. The ritual of the act, so to 
speak, was scarcely evangelical; but the act 
itself was the gold of Christian charity. It 
was another case for reflections upon Gunga 
Dhin! 

The fact is that we have much to learn from 
these men concerning the heart of the Christian 
idea of good; for deeds of unselfishness are 
startlingly common. Wounded men will vie 
with each other to get a friend attended to first. 
"I'm all right, but my mate there is pretty 
bad," is the common formula. Probably the 
mate, on being questioned, will invert the state- 
ment. War may make men savage; its suf- 
ferings seem to make them wondrous kind. 
There is a large number of Sir Philip Sidneys 
in the forces to-day ; and they stand in striking 
contrast to many reputable figures, who find 



THE GOOD MAN 123 

it easier to talk about a cup of cold water than 
to give one. In a Scottish park there stands 
a curious monument erected by an eighteenth 
century legal light, who cut a considerable 
figure in his time, on which he caused this 
inscription to be engraved: "Graft benevo- 
lence upon the tree of self-love. The fruit will 
be delicious." It is a long, long way from that 
pretentious instruction upon how not to be a 
Christian, to the episode upon the French road. 

The fact of the continuous stream of unself- 
ishness displayed as between individuals on 
service should give encouragement to those 
who desire to think well of their fellow-men. 
There is enough and to spare of evil in the 
heart; no supporter of original sin need fail 
for lack of evidence; but for our belief that 
God made man in His own image there is evi- 
dence also. It is comforting to know that, 
amongst all sorts and conditions of men, the 
image has not been blotted out. 

But it is not only in personal relations that 
unselfishness is shown. It is seen also in re- 
gard to the cause as a whole. Many unex- 
pected men seem to have reached the point of 
assent to what may come of pain and loss to 



124 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

themselves, provided that the world is to grow 
fairer thereby. Sometimes, the expressions 
of this selflessness are on a lofty scale, as in 
the case of a young Scottish minister, who 
served as a combatant, and has lost his life, who 
declared his perfect willingness for annihila- 
tion, if only so could the world's betterment 
come. But simpler men reach the same point. 
A sergeant in a base camp some time ago was 
returning to his unit after being wounded 
twice. He was, as we have it in Scotland, 
"fey." A presentiment was upon him that he 
would not come back; and to all optimistic 
prophecies he turned a deaf ear. "But," he 
said, "I don't mind. It's going to be a better 
world for the kiddies afterwards." What is 
this but religion in a very pure form? What 
are these but good men? Would not the 
Church be stronger in the world for God's 
Kingdom, if these were His recognised repre- 
sentatives, in place of egregious and safe per- 
sons, whose experiments in practical Christian- 
ity do not go further than grafting a little 
benevolence on a deep-rooted tree of self-love? 
From this self-identification with a cause 
springs the soldier's negative contribution to 



THE GOOD MAN 125 

the thought of good. His thought of blackest 
wrong is disloyalty to the community which 
stands for his ideal. The sin of sins is treach- 
ery ; the basal virtue of all is loyalty. A chap- 
lain has reported that a story of treachery on 
the part of some man once went round a bat- 
talion; and the men spoke of it with bated 
breath, as of a horror too dire to be contem- 
plated. The penalty for treachery is death. 
It may be doubted if a soldier could be found 
who would think it too severe. 

Courage, selflessness, loyalty — these are the 
virtues that are being brought back from the 
blood-stained fields by the men, who offer their 
bodies to be broken that we may be safe. 
They are not angels, nor do they look it. 
They are not saints; and often those who 
grieve most at their failings are themselves. 
But one thing they are, and that is men. And 
it is a Church in which manhood of that sort 
will find a congenial atmosphere that must 
await them when they come home. 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 



CHAPTER VI 

The Sword of the Saints 

46 T3RAYER is the very sword of the 
5T saints," said Francis Thompson. The 
age of the Church's victories has ever seen its 
swift flash from out the scabbard. If in the 
last days the words of prayer had become al- 
most congealed on the lips of multitudes, there 
has now come upon us a new day when prayer 
has again become a reality. Men and women 
who had ceased to pray for themselves have 
been driven to the feet of God in an agony of 
supplication praying for their loved ones. 
They cannot help it. "We have in these days 
of scientific enlightenment a great deal of dis- 
cussion about the efficacy of prayer," wrote 
William James, "and many reasons have been 
given us why we should not pray, whilst others 
are given why we should. But in all this very 
little is said of the reasons why we do pray. 
. . . The reason why we pray is simply that 
we cannot help praying." We have, in very 

129 



130 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

truth, come to the day when we cannot help 
praying. In the moment of extremity the 
appeal to God, conscious or unconscious, 
springs from the heart. "They are at their 
wit's end, then they cry to Jehovah," is the 
testimony of the Psalmist. And even the 
funk-prayer is heard, for he adds : "And He 
bringeth them out of their distresses." What 
the cloudless day cannot do, the hurricane 
effects. "I have been driven many times to 
my knees by the overwhelming conviction that 
I had nowhere else to go," wrote Abraham 
Lincoln. "My own wisdom and that of all 
around me seemed insufficient for the day." 
And so it is now. The statesman in his cabi- 
net and the soldier in the trench are at one in 
the day when all earthly refuge fails and God 
alone remains. "I had not prayed for years 
but I prayed then," is the testimony of many a 
man. 



There were two things which conspired to 
dry up the fountain of prayer, and we may well 
consider them for a moment. The one was 
the realisation of the universe as the sphere of 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 131 

changeless law, and the other the sense of our 
individual insignificance in relation to our 
growing knowledge of the vastness of the uni- 
verse. In a world where law reigned and in 
which the human life was but as the flapping 
of a midge's wing, it seemed but mere fanati- 
cism to pray for anything with any expectation 
save of a reflex purifying effect in the heart of 
the suppliant. Are we then to put the sword 
of prayer in its sheath and draw it no more? 

(1) No doubt the material universe pre- 
sents to us the operation of changeless laws. 
From the centre to the circumference these 
laws operate regardless of the puny will of 
man. In such a world definite petition seems 
as absurd as that God should say to the sun 
every morning, as Chesterton remarks, "Get 
up and do it again." The sun is controlled by 
law and everything is automatic. The heav- 
ens declare the glory of law. God is shut up 
in the steel prison house of cosmic law without 
ever a chink through which tenderness or help 
can pulsate towards the creatures He has 
made. Such a conception of God freezes the 
fountain of prayer at its source. A man may 
still go on praying, driven by irrational im- 



132 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

pulse, but prayer is only a species of spiritual 
gymnastics — mere "dumb-bell exercise." 

But to surrender the prerogative of prayer 
to a conception such as this is to be blind to the 
great fact that there is in the world something 
greater than law, and that is personality. We 
ourselves know how the human personality can 
mould and shape unchangeable law and make 
it do his will. If gravitation decrees that 
water shall run downward, men can decree that 
it flow upward to the level of its source. If 
electricity can rend the heavens and spread 
disaster and death in the destroying lightning, 
man can take its laws and so combine them 
that it drives his machinery, makes his cities 
bright almost as day, and send his messages 
round the earth. If law imprisons the stone 
and iron and marble in the everlasting hills, 
men by the same law can rear St. Paul's and 
hang the iron bridges high in air over the 
chasms. Instead of unchangeable law making 
progress impossible, it is the fact of law being 
unchangeable, and thus to be depended on, 
that makes all progress possible. By it the 
aeroplane mounts to heaven, and the shell 
screams over head. And if man can thus 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 133 

mould law to his will, who can dare say that 
He Who is the source of all law is helpless and 
imprisoned ? 

What is law but the ordered will of per- 
sonality? Law is unthinkable without a 
law-giver. The progress of philosophy has 
reached the stage when the whole universe 
is realised to be but materialised thought. 
Thought can have but one source, a thinking 
personality. The only expression of the 
source of all things is a Personality shaping 
the universe to His will. The relation of men 
to God is thus a personal relationship — the re- 
lationship of the finite to the infinite Personal- 
ity. And if the finite personality can control 
law and make it do his will, how much more 
the infinite Personality? If on the one hand 
the world be pre-determined law, on the other 
the Personality of whose thought the universe 
is but a shadow can mould that law and direct 
it as He will. We know but little of the se- 
crets of God's working, but we can understand 
how problems which to us are insoluble are 
not even problems to Him. To the savage a 
motor is an insoluble enigma; to the mechanic 
that controls it there is no mystery whatever 



134 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

within its compass. And we are far less fitted 
to judge the universe than the primitive man 
to judge a motor-car! 

We can, at least, be sure of this, that there 
is nothing in the order of the universe that 
can obstruct and render futile the prayer that 
is in harmony with the divine purpose. God's 
personality is the one reality; and when the 
sailor on the deep or the soldier on the battle- 
field cry to Him, the cry does not beat against 
the prison-walls of law like waves fretting at 
the base of the cliff, but mounts to the heart of 
Him, the outgoing of whose will is the suste- 
nance and the glory of the material world, and 
Who is infinitely greater than the operation of 
His law. Within the operation of law He is 
free to shape the issues of the soul : free to hear 
and to answer prayer. 

(2) No doubt it was easier to conceive 
prayer as moving the will of God when this 
world was to men the centre of the universe 
with the sun and the stars its circling ministers. 
But now, when we have realised that this world 
is but a tiny globule, a third-rate satellite of a 
fifth-rate star, in relation to the universe, but 
as a grain of sand on the world's shores, and 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 135 

human life but the mere flashes of troubled 
consciousness succeeding each other, genera- 
tion after generation into darkness, it does 
seem but human vanity to think that creatures 
so insignificant and ephemeral should claim 
to move the arm of God or affect His will. 
It is a strange result of the glimpse that has 
come to us of an illimitable universe — this 
cheapening of ourselves. In the vision of the 
boundless material universe the soul is over- 
whelmed and its cry is silenced. 

To deliver ourselves from this material 
prison-house we have only to think that what 
seems of little account to ignorance is of vital 
moment to knowledge. To the eye of the illit- 
erate a library presents the aspect of thousands 
of books, all alike, varying only in size — a 
dreary and a barren waste. Kindlings for fire 
— that is all their value to him. But to the 
lover of books each is an individual entity, with 
each its separate quota of knowledge and each 
its own expression of mind and soul. When 
first you find yourself in the heart of Africa 
each native seems like every other native, all 
alike as peas, with nothing to distinguish black 
from black. But to the man that knows and 



166 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

loves them each is an individual, as clearly dif- 
ferentiated as the members of the one family 
are to the parents. As knowledge grows the 
separate individuality grows clearer in outline, 
more precious in essence. And we make our 
appeal to Omniscience. He made us all, and 
He made each different, and Pie will never re- 
peat a single personality. Each is therefore 
of inestimable value to Him. And the cry of 
each He will hear. He sees us not in masses 
but as individuals. That is why He never 
makes two out of the same mould. 

We have only to exercise our imagination 
(and every exercise of the imagination is in 
the line of Him Who saw kingdoms in mus- 
tard seeds) to be delivered from the bondage 
of the thought of material vastness rendering 
prayer futile. Even the material world is sen- 
sitive to the feeblest force brought to play upon 
it. When the ball a child throws into the air 
descends to earth there is a two-fold movement 
— the movement of the ball downward and the 
movement of the earth upward to meet it. It 
is only the lack of sensitiveness in our instru- 
ments that prevents our measuring the earth's 
ascent to meet the ball. And it is only because 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 137 

we lack imagination that we have difficulty in 
realising that in the spiritual realm, where per- 
sonality alone is great, God must respond to 
every approach of His children. Whereso- 
ever the son says, "I will arise and go to my 
father," there also the Father must arise and 
go to meet His son. Such is the law of spir- 
itual gravitation. 

It is when we realise the relative value of the 
material and the spiritual that we realise that 
the soul can still appeal to God in the assurance 
that its cry is heard. A material world is a 
worthless thing compared to a soul. The 
mountain may fall and crush a man, but the 
man in being crushed to death is greater than 
the mountain, for he knows he is being crushed, 
but the mountain knows nothing. A soul that 
can love and laugh and pray is greater far than 
a dead world. The poorest labourer in the 
mines is of infinitely greater value than all the 
diamonds of Kimberley; for they know noth- 
ing, whereas he is born with the possibilities of 
endless growth in goodness. They can reflect 
the sun, but he can reflect God and cling in love 
and in terror to His hand. That is the ro- 
mance of religion. And in that romance the 



138 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

thrill and the power lies in the dialogue when 
the soul communes with God. And that is 
prayer. 

Surely we can deliver ourselves from the 
bondage of our little knowledge and refuse to 
sell our birthright at the bidding of those who 
speak either of changeless law or of a limitless 
universe. For law is but our slave, and the 
universe only our standing-place. We are 
each greater than law, greater than the uni- 
verse. And though the great army be num- 
bered by millions, and to man we be but a 
number, yet to God we are each as dear and 
as valuable as if we, each alone, existed. And 
when we turn to Him in noisome trench or on 
the swelling deep, there is a thrill of joyous 
response in the realm unseen as the words are 
spoken as of old: "Behold! he prayeth." It 
is morally impossible that men should have 
been since the dawn of time talking to a heaven 
that is as brass and from which no answer can 
come. 

II 

But though the reasonableness of prayer be 
admitted yet there are many who in the heyday 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 139 

of strength and of youth dismiss the thought 
of prayer as mere effeminacy. They have 
heard the words, "God's will be done," and 
they sounded as the sign of a wearied and sad 
resignation. Such a mood was not for them 
as yet. But so far from prayer being the voice 
of submission it is the most moving, the most 
vehement, and the most victorious desire of the 
heart. For prayer is not the quietism of age, 
but rather the unloosing of dynamic force, and 
the marshalling of tireless energy for glorious 
victory. 

(1) Prayer provides God with the instru- 
ment requisite for the achievement of His pur- 
pose. For God works by means; and the 
chosen instruments of His will are men. 
Without the co-operation of men God is help- 
less. The war-cry of old fired the blood: 
"The sword of the Lord and of Gideon." 
There was only one sword, that of God wielded 
by Gideon. Without Gideon that sword of 
God could not be wielded. 

". . . If my hand slacked 
I should rob God, since He is fullest good 

He could not make Antonio Stradivari's violins 
Without Antonio." 



140 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

We can thus see that in the work of saving 
the world God is helpless without the prayers 
of the heart. For what is prayer but the 
glimpse of the purpose of God for the world 
and the surrender of the life as an instrument 
for the doing of that purpose? The men who 
pray: "Thy will be done," and who realise 
the urgency of that Will becoming operative, 
are also the men who gird on their armour and 
go forth to fight that the will of God may 
triumph over all its foes. It has ever been so. 
Men have prayed and through prayer have 
seen the beckoning hand of God, and then have 
thrown their lives into the midst of the conflict. 
To pray thus is to fill up the ranks of God's 
army — the army that marches to certain vic- 
tory. 

(2) Not only does prayer place the weapon 
He needs in the hand of God, but it can release 
God's quickening power and mould His action. 
We can realise this in various ways. When a 
man is living his life on a low level of selfish- 
ness and animalism, God treats that man by 
the method of hedging him in, of obstructing 
and isolating him. This is the end to which 
God's ordering of life always works towards 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 141 

those who defy His laws. But the man is 
aroused to a realisation of the folly and sin of 
his way. He turns away from his evil courses. 
He prays God to visit him in his low estate and 
to deal with him not as a rebel but as one who 
is seeking to do His will. Instantly God's 
attitude towards that man is changed. All 
the power of God that formerly fought against 
him is now fighting for him. He is dealt with 
no longer as a rebel but as a son. Thus can 
prayer alter the dealing of God with the soul. 
It is the same with a nation. Here is a 
nation sinking on its lees into the slough of 
degeneration. The altars of God are being 
forsaken, and the haunts of their own pleasure 
are their one resort. They desert the field of 
hardness and refuse the burden of preparing 
to defend the empire their fathers reared. 
They carry on a conflict of words, shouting 
themselves hoarse over bi-lateral campaigns 
regarding false issues. The vital matters of 
goodness and character are forgotten. They 
crowd the shrines of Bacchus and Aphrodite. 
For such a nation God has only one purpose, 
and that is destruction. But that nation is 
suddenly arrested in the midst of its downward 



142 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

progress. There comes the sound of guns 
across the sea heralding doom. There arises 
a sudden emergency. It has to choose be- 
tween peril and degrading safety ; between the 
facing of death and dishonour. And lo! the 
ancient beacon fires of righteousness and self- 
sacrifice suddenly blaze forth once more. The 
nation calls upon God. The fields of its 
pleasure are forsaken and its manhood crowds 
once more the fields of hardness. It lays hold 
on the sword with the awe that comes to the 
heart that realises that the sword it grips is 
God's. And instantly the will of God regard- 
ing that nation is altered. If formerly that 
will was destruction now it is salvation. If 
there be a will of God that prayer cannot alter, 
that will by which the heavens stand, there is 
another will of God that can be altered — a will 
with which man is called upon to wrestle, and 
wrestling to save his soul. We can thus see 
that prayer can be the mightiest power in the 
universe. It can even move the arm of the 
omnipotent Creator Who speaks and it is done, 
Who commands and all things stand fast. 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 143 



III 

But God does not answer every prayer. 
There is only one answer for many a prayer, 
and that is — silence. "When ye make your 
prayers I will not hear; your hands are full 
of blood." When we read of Christians pray- 
ing against Christians, we have to remember 
that prayer is only heard when it is offered in 
Christ's name — that is in His spirit of love and 
meekness, and self-sacrifice. 

A Frenchman, Julien Flament, wrote a 
mordant sketch that illustrates this. He de- 
picted the German Emperor, clad in his grey 
cloak, "flecked with blood," bowing his helmet 
before the Crib. Pie addresses the Divine 
Child: — "Thou art on our side, O Lord: I 
am Thy lieutenant. . . . Thou wilt share 
my triumph. . . . Lord God of the German 
armies, bless Thou the German Emperor." 
The Christ-Child, silent, seems only to grow 
pale. The Kaiser prays again. He promises 
to place on the ruins of the world: "Thy 
Cross and my flag." Still the Child is silent, 
and the Kaiser, with trembling voice, asks: — 



144 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

"Have I not done and suffered enough for 
Thee? Millions of my soldiers lie dead; the 
ravens are weary of their feast." At last the 
Christ- Child softly and sorrowfully makes an- 
swer: — "I would fain bless thee, but I cannot. 
In Belgium last winter I lost My way. I took 
refuge beneath a hedgerow from the icy blast. 
Some drunken German soldiers sprang upon 
Me. I had no defence but My smile and My 
tears. • . . To punish Me they drew their 
swords. . . . How can I bless thee without 
My hands, the little hands of a child . . . 
which they cut of! 3 

That visualises the truth that hands red with 
innocent blood are raised in vain to a holy God. 
When a man prays in his own name, and not 
in Christ's name ; when he uses prayer merely 
as an instrument for the gratification of his 
own pride, and the realisation of his earthly 
ambitions; when he desires his will to prevail 
over the Will of God, and that his arm of flesh 
should wield the power of the Omnipotent, 
such a prayer is not addressed to the all-holy 
God, but to a God of indulgence fashioned in 
his own image. The granting of such prayer 
would mean that God's Will would never be 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 145 

done. For such prayer there is within the 
eternal glory no voice nor any that answers. 
The very soul of prayer is: "Thy Will be 
done on earth as it is in heaven." When we 
surrender our lives into conformity with that 
Divine Will, then, and then only, do our 
prayers have power with God and prevail. It 
is the nation that consecrates itself to the doing 
of the Will of God through and through, that 
cleanses its life, and feels in its heart Christ's 
eternal passion for righteousness — that strives 
to do God's Will in the midst of its streets, and 
unto the ends of the earth — it is that nation 
whose prayers God hears and will answer, 

IV 

There remains the difficulty of those who 
have prayed in the Spirit of Christ, and whose 
prayers have brought no answer. Can it be 
that the prayer of love and unselfishness can 
be hurled back in contempt from the Throne 
of God? To that there is only one answer. 
No true prayer is ever left unanswered. 

(1) Our prayers are often answered when 
we are bewailing their being unanswered. 



146 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

Many have prayed in these last years for the 
cleansing of the national life, and they do not 
realise that God has answered their prayer by 
the hurricane of war. How many prayers 
have risen to heaven in these last three years 
for the victory of righteousness and freedom! 
And the victory has tarried. But God is an- 
swering the prayers of His people all the time. 
For victory can only come in one way — 
through the spirit of self-sacrifice that bares 
the breast to the foe. In the millions of men 
who rallied to the flag of freedom in the early 
days, who sacrificed all that the nation might 
live, who came from the far north-west, and 
from the long wash of Australasian seas, with 
the passion of patriotism alight in their eyes, 
God answered our prayers. In the endurance 
of these men when, unprovided and well-nigh 
unarmed, they held the line, thin and waver- 
ing, that stood between us and destruction — 
He answered our prayers. And when, at last, 
the burden became grievous and almost intol- 
erable, a new spirit breathed through a hundred 
millions across the sea who speak our language, 
and they realised that we were bleeding and 
dying for the world's soul, and they took their 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 147 

place by our side, saying: "We will share 
your burden, fighting and dying, even to the 
end" — then, surely, God was answering our 
prayers. The heavens have been ablaze in 
these last years with the chariots and horsemen 
of God hurrying to the help of the legions of 
righteousness, but our eyes failed to recognise 
them, and we bewailed the silence of God and 
prayers left unanswered ! 

The form of our prayer is often denied when 
the substance of our prayer is granted. St. 
Monica prayed in a sea-side chapel on the 
African coast that her son, Augustine, might 
be prevented from going to Rome, for she 
feared what might become of him in that home 
of licentiousness. Even as she prayed with 
strong crying and tears, her son sailed for 
Italy. And, there, Ambrose led him to the 
light, and he became a Christian in the very 
place from which his mother's prayers would 
have kept him. If the thing we plead for and 
the way we choose, be oft denied, it is because 
there is something greater, and a better way, 
which God is preparing to bestow upon us. 
That is why some of our prayers are often met 
by an uncompromising refusal. But the spirit 



148 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

of our prayers ever brings enrichment, if not 
the enrichment we crave. 

(2) The answer to prayer comes slowly, 
and because of that we are often discouraged. 
But, again, we must remember that God works 
by means, and not arbitrarily. A man may 
pray for a loving heart, and his prayer is an- 
swered by the opportunity being provided him 
for loving service. A prayer for food can only 
be answered through the long processes of ger- 
minating and ripening grain. Jezreel prays 
the corn; the corn prays the earth; the earth 
prays the heavens for rain, and the heavens 
pray God. An apple cannot grow without the 
co-operation of all the world's laws. And 
prayer for its answering requires a combina- 
tion of vast forces. While the processes for 
its answer are in motion, we must not despair 
of the ultimate answer just because these 
processes are slow. 



The highest form of prayer is the prayer of 
intercession. That, at least, we have learned 
in these days. Many who had ceased to pray 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 149 

for themselves have, in the days of stress, 
clasped the feet of God in an agony of inter- 
cession for their sons and their loved ones. 
This prayer for others is the nearest we can 
come to Him Who said: "I have prayed for 
thee that thy faith fail not" ; and Who, nailed 
to the Cross, interceded for those who drove 
the nails through His hands and feet, saying: 
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." 

We need have little difficulty in realising 
how prayer offered far away at home may gar- 
rison the hearts of men in the day of battle. 
As the vapours arise in the heart of the equa- 
torial seas, condense into clouds, and are 
wafted by the winds across the ocean until, 
arrested by some mountain range, they fall in 
showers on the parched earth, clothing it with 
greenness and with riches; so the prayers ris- 
ing from the hearts at home come as spiritual 
enrichment to souls far away. For God is 
omnipresent, and this world is islanded in the 
spiritual and the unseen. The impulse where- 
with the praying heart moves God can be in- 
stantly communicated to the person prayed 
for; for both are enveloped by God. And if 



150 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

prayer be the appointed means for unloosen- 
ing the divine energy, we can realise how ur- 
gent the need that we should give ourselves to 
prayer. In the grimy trenches, as he keeps his 
watch under the stars, weariness falls on the 
soldier as a pall ; but suddenly a thought comes 
to him of home ; a memory of the faces he loves, 
and he recalls moments when the vision of 
God flashed out, and he feels again the thrill 
he felt when first he left all and followed ; and 
there comes the consciousness that God is with 
him, and that nothing can stand against him. 
There often come such moments when that 
environment of misery is transmitted into a 
great cathedral aglow with the very presence 
of God. Whence comes that transmitting 
power that changes a miry trench into Bethel? 
It has come because someone far away is pray- 
ing, and has unloosed the vision, and sent the 
Spirit to revivify the heart. Thus prayer can 
inspire an army with the conquering spirit. 

There is a story written of the conscripts 
at Waterloo which tells how they fought all 
day, until suddenly in the evening they had 
a sense that there was nothing behind them. 
The field was empty, and there was no support. 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 151 

It was then their hearts failed them, and they 
broke and fled. Men can fight the foe in 
front, but they cannot endure emptiness be- 
hind. So also is it in the spiritual realm. 
The spirit that conquers is as the wind blowing 
whither it listeth. It comes to the hearts of 
men, and conscript peasants break through 
marshalled hosts, and trample empires under- 
foot ; it lays hold on moorsmen and cottars, and 
they pull down tyrannies that defy the world. 
And that spirit that fires the heart with en- 
thusiasm, and makes the will as steel, comes 
through prayer. Behind the armies of free- 
dom the spiritual fields are not empty. The 
prayers of those who agonise, wrestling with 
God, are the reserves that win long campaigns. 
They are the flash of inspiration to the jaded 
brain, the feeling of irresistible power that 
sweeps over every obstacle. This was what 
General Gordon meant when he said: "I 
have prayed my boats up the Nile." The cat- 
aracts could not stop men whom he inspired 
with an indomitable spirit. 



152 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



VI 

This is the supreme need in these last days, 
that we should betake ourselves to prayer. 
For the war is now a war of endurance, a con- 
flict of the soul, and the victory will rest with 
the nation that can sustain to the bitter end the 
will to conquer. And there is but one way of 
making our will adamant, and that is by merg- 
ing it in the will of God. It is God's Will 
alone that knows no change, and man's will 
will be as God's in that measure in which the 
human will identifies itself with the Divine. 
And in all ages men have found but one way of 
reinforcing the will from the reservoirs of God, 
and that the way of prayer. Along that chan- 
nel came the power that endured. 

But the prayer that would thus inflame the 
soul and enervate the arm must be alive with 
strength. "The curse of so much religion," 
said George Meredith, "is that men cling to 
God with their weakness rather than their 
strength." The prayer that renews is a wres- 
tling with God even unto blood. "Being in 
an agony He prayed more earnestly." The 



THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 153 

prayers that are lightly tossed into the Sacred 
Presence can mean nothing. Even we would 
not heed such prayers. The rivers of spiritual 
vitality that renew the faltering courage and 
enable races to set their faces towards Calvary 
with unfaltering feet, have their rise in the 
souls that, at one with Christ in the agony of 
intercession, lay hold on God refusing to let go. 
There comes the moment when the soul 
musters all its energy and lays hold on the 
Unseen — that moment before men go over the 
parapet, and look death in the face with faces 
unveiled. Then, for an instant at least, the 
soul and God are face to face. "O, my God, 
help me to do my work thoroughly, and, if it 
be Thy Will, bring me safe through," is the 
cry of the soul then. There is the red of Geth- 
semane in that prayer. And when the hearts 
of men in the after days, facing the battle 
against the world's iniquity, will so cry to God. 
. . . then the world's redemption shall draw 
nigh. 



IMMORTALITY 



CHAPTER VII 
Immortality 

THERE is little need for any man to go to 
our soldiers in order to convince them of 
Immortality; for they are convinced already 
that "death's true name is Onward." Votes 
have sometimes been taken in huts where the 
men congregate, as to whether they believe 
that their dead friends have gone out like the 
flame of a candle; and the usual majority 
against such a thought was in the proportion 
of nine to one. It may be doubted whether 
such a preponderance would have been secured 
in time of peace. One cause of so much agree- 
ment that death does not close all is stated to be 
simply love of friends. Men might think that 
they themselves should pass into nothingness; 
but they do not believe it possible that such a 
fate has pursued those whom they have loved, 
and lost awhile on the field of battle. At any 
rate, such is the faith of many thousands of 
men whom I asked to give their frank opinion. 

157 



158 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

They believe that the dead are alive, and that 
they will meet them again some summer morn- 
ing. 

But when it comes to a question, not of the 
fact, but of the content of immortality, we find 
a very different attitude. They are deeply 
interested in what happens after death — and 
no wonder. But they are by no means satis- 
fied with traditional answers — which is no 
cause for surprise, either. Neither do they 
give much heed to the sentimental soothing 
which is ladled out by some who tell them that 
a soldier's death is an immediate passport into 
bliss. For they have been dealing with reali- 
ties, and have a keen sense for that which is out 
of touch with facts. They realise that the 
manner of a man's death does not alter funda- 
mental principles; and they are quite clear 
that the moral government of the world is not 
weak. At the same time, all of us must recog- 
nise that the sacrifice of youth is a great sacri- 
fice. The sudden yielding up of all that life 
offers, when life is at its fairest, will be taken 
favourably into account by perfect equity. 
Those who have died before their prime that 
others may live, and that the world may be 



IMMORTALITY 159 

more worthy, are in a position of their own. 
Dante was no sentimentalist ; but it was he who 
conceived the heaven of- the soldiers of the 
Cross — the first heaven that lies completely 
beyond earth's shadow — the only heaven which 
bears in the midst of its ruddy light the sign 
of the Cross, along the bars of which the gal- 
lant dead flash in splendour — the only heaven, 
until that of the Church Triumphant, in which 
the vision of Christ Himself appears. And 
there is an evangelical point behind such 
imaginings; for a voluntary death for an ideal 
is an expression of faith, and by faith are men 
saved. Everything, we are all agreed, de- 
pends on a man's state of being; and assent to 
death for a good cause indicates a state of 
being full of promise for the unknown years. 



The Christian Church has two outlines to 
offer of the Life to which we all move. Both 
are open to criticism. The Roman view of 
Purgatory does not meet our present difficul- 
ties, inasmuch as entrance to it is solely for 
the saved, with a view to their purification. 



160 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

It leaves the problem of the unfaithful darker 
than ever. It only puts the haven of rest and 
felicity further off: and, in addition, it has 
proved itself in past ages to be the origin of 
manifest abuses and much first-class supersti- 
tion. The view of the Reformed Church, on 
the other hand, does not square with the facts 
of human nature. It proceeds upon a hypoth- 
esis of black and white, whereas most of us 
are grey; nor does it take account of unequal 
chance. It has one great advantage, however, 
in that it concentrates attention upon present 
opportunity, which is precisely what our Lord 
did. His teaching upon the future life is curi- 
ously veiled. His doctrine of the importance 
of the present is as emphatic as it can be. He 
was evidently sorely anxious that men should 
enter in at the open door here and now, and 
deprecated anything that ministers to human 
sloth in moral decision. Inasmuch as our Re- 
formed ancestors caught this note in His 
preaching, and reiterated the urgency and 
solemnity of His appeals, they cannot be 
wholly off the right track. At the same time, 
they, strong men as they were, tended to push 
Scripture beyond the legitimate point to sup- 



IMMORTALITY 161 

port the sharp rigidity of their views. One of 
the "proof-texts" used in the Westminster 
Confession to support the doctrine of hell is 
"the spirits in prison" — a flagrant case of tear- 
ing a phrase from its context, seeing that the 
full text, "He preached unto the spirits in 
prison," is one of the chief supports in Scrip- 
ture of those who hold to an intermediate state. 
There are well-known and sufficient historical 
reasons for their anxiety to be rid of Purga- 
tory ; but it might have been as well if they had 
displayed a little more caution in defining mat- 
ters, which our Lord Himself set forth in sym- 
bol. We can of necessity know but little of 
the conditions of a purely spiritual life. It is 
best for us to bow the head, and wait. 

II 

But one point is clear concerning the 
Church's teaching. All branches, Roman and 
Reformed, agree that ultimate destiny is 
fixed at death. And many men, not in the 
least irreverently, want to know the grounds 
for that great assumption. For it alike per- 
plexes us in regard to some facts that we know 



162 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

in relation to death, and seems to be out of 
accord with some of the clearest Scriptural 
teaching concerning God. If destiny is ir- 
revocably fixed, why do some seem to have so 
much longer a chance? If it were not by rea- 
son of strength that men reach four-score 
years, but were the rule for all; if all ex- 
perienced the varying ministries of the middle- 
years and of old age, we might not feel the 
same difficulty in regarding earth as a final 
probation for eternity. But the facts are far 
different, and war-time especially brings the 
difference home to us. In a moment, in the 
twinkling of an eye, a lad of nineteen, with his 
character all unformed, is struck out of life. 
What might he not have known and won, if 
he had lived till twenty-five? It is all very 
well to say that the Judge of all the earth will 
do right. Of course He will; but the Church 
teaches that according to the state of a man at 
the moment of death he must be judged, and it 
is a wild theory to imagine that only those who 
hereafter would resist the impulses of grace are 
permitted to die on the battle-field, and that 
those who will take them will be given oppor- 
tunities so to do. That would be an inver- 



IMMORTALITY 163 

sion of the adage that those whom the gods 
love die young, with a vengeance. The plain 
fact is that death comes unequally; it finds 
multitudes of the immature unprepared; and, 
consequently, the thought that the moment of 
passing is the moment of eternal settlement 
seems to contain implications concerning the 
world-government strangely alien to the con- 
ception of a God of justice. 

In addition, there is the perplexity of a con- 
ception of a Heavenly Father who shuts the 
door on anything but absolute evil. If Christ 
emphasised the necessity of seizing the unfor- 
giving minute, He still more emphasised the 
unchangeableness of the love of God. There 
is no need to search the Scriptures to find that 
doctrine. It is writ large on every page. No 
man would have to wrench texts from their 
context to prove that thesis. If he had noth- 
ing else, he could turn to Luke xv, and to the 
story of the Cross. And how are we to square 
that great teaching with a doctrine that ban- 
ishes erring lads, struck down by a German 
bullet, eternally from the divine Presence? 
The fact is that it is a circle that cannot be 
squared. Love does not shut doors ; the gates 



164 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

of its city are open continually. The only 
difficulty about entrance is our unwillingness 
to turn our steps to the shelter that is within 
them. 

There is some mediaeval story of a youth who 
passed through the doors inscribed with the 
abandonment of hope. His friend, his lady, 
and his mother in due course came to the realm 
of rest, and found him not. His friend went 
straightway to the presence of God and 
pleaded for his release. His lady broke the 
bounds of heaven, and, finding her way to the 
gates of his prison, laid hold upon their bars 
and demanded that he should be set free. 
But his mother, taking the same path, shook 
the barriers that held him from her, and with 
importunity asked for one thing only, that she 
should be permitted to reach his side, and 
should be allowed with him to share it all. 
And mother-love is a love that springs from 
God. "As one whom his mother comforteth, 
so will I comfort you." It is not easy to think 
of a mother who would cease to work for her 
son's redemption because a shell had shattered 
his body. The fact is that the mothers are 
hopelessly unorthodox. They assent, in the- 



IMMORTALITY 165 

ory, to the conceivable ultimate tragedy for 
some other mother's sons; but never for their 
own. I have been at pains to press for an 
answer on this point, from mothers who are 
manifestly "far ben," and the answer is always 
the same; the reason being that they do not 
believe that their love can be beaten. And if 
they, being evil, would give good gifts, here 
or anywhere, to their children, how much more 
will their Heavenly Father? The Church is 
in danger of making soldiers say that their 
mothers are more worship-worthy than God. 

Now, this may apparently lead to a view of 
destiny of the easiest and most un-moral sort. 
But that is only an appearance; for these 
same mothers will permit any pain to come 
to their children, if thereby purity shall be 
their delight. They seek first the Kingdom of 
God for their sons ; and are prepared to allow, 
and to endure, any suffering if that may be 
their ultimate possession. A good mother is 
the very last person on earth to agree that her 
son should permanently be satisfied with sin. 
But she will suffer any sort of cross, to the end 
of time, to make him whole. Surely God is 
like that; and the only hands that can close 



166 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

the gates of final peace against a man are those 
of the man himself. 

Reflections of this sort do not make the 
world less severe morally. The great danger 
of pushing inferences from the love of God to 
their legitimate limit lies in the proneness of 
human nature to postpone effort. If we have 
chances beyond the grave, why trouble now? 
Let us gather roses while we may. But, wher- 
ever or whenever a man would lay hold on 
eternal life, it is he that must take the decisive 
action; and there are various considerations 
that lead us to come to the conclusion that the 
sooner we take that action the better. The 
love of God never changes ; but we do — if not 
for the better, then for the worse; and it will 
never be easier for us to turn to Him than now. 

Ill 

Death must indeed be "an awfully great 
adventure." To reach the bourne, whence no 
traveller returns, must contain experiences 
past imagining. But there is one remark that 
we may make about them — they must happen 



IMMORTALITY 167 

to us. It is the same man that will wake there, 
that has lived here. 

If we can say that, we say enough to make 
us take grave thought for that to-morrow that 
so quickly dawns for all men. In some quar- 
ters a queer belief is found that death itself is a 
regenerating agency — as if it were a kind of 
sacrament that cleansed the soul from sin. I 
have discovered strong traces of that sugges- 
tion amongst the miners of the North of Eng- 
land, and occasionally amongst soldiers drawn 
from other parts. It is a comfortable teach- 
ing; let a man die, and dying itself is enough 
to secure a man from death's penalties. 

It need hardly be said that Christianity of- 
fers no support to this view. Abraham, Dives 
and Lazarus retain their identity upon the 
other side. Death does not change a man, it 
only makes him more manifest. For he has 
passed to a spiritual world, in which spiritual 
things are discerned. Its values are moral; its 
beauties are the beauties of virtue, its ugli- 
nesses are the uglinesses of sin. The splen- 
dour of the white rose has become the splen- 
dour of purity; the loveliness of the red rose 



168 GOD Ax\D THE SOLDIER 

has become the glory of sacrifice. The fash- 
ion of this world has passed away ; and beauty 
has become the beauty of holiness. In relation 
to these new standards of the fair a man must 
measure himself — and measure himself when at 
last he is seen to be himself. 

Socrates advised us, as the sole path to wis- 
dom, to tread the road that leads to knowledge 
of ourselves. If only we could obey him! 
Eut how shall a man discover himself, veiled 
as he is by the garment of his flesh? Francis 
Thompson has warned us that there is a hidden 
citadel of self, the key whereof hangs at God's 
girdle alone. We cannot know ourselves; we 
cannot know each other. But we can have 
dim surmisings of the forces of evil that lie 
submerged in us. Every now and then we be- 
come aware of what we might do, if we were 
set free to go to our own place; and then the 
glimpse is withholden and we walk in loneli- 
ness. The tragedy of our living is not only 
that we are hidden from one another — what 
man ever opened his heart to his friend? — but 
that we are mysteries to ourselves. Even St. 
Paul found himself an insoluble enigma. 
"The good that I would, I do not," he cried; 



IMMORTALITY 169 

and we can catch the half -indignant tone of 
complaint in his utterance. We do not know 
ourselves; and alone we cannot find rest — and 
never shall, until we rest in the God that un- 
derstands us. 

Now, it may be that the poignancy of the 
adventure of death lies in this — that thereby 
we know ourselves at last. In the light of the 
spiritual world, the man stands out clear to his 
own eyes, measured in his real being against 
the standard of Jesus Christ. What wonder 
that we fear death? What shame it would 
be if we did not ! For in self-knowledge, apart 
from the cleansing mercy of God, how deep 
are the possibilities of pain. We pass to a 
spiritual world. What if our spiritual facul- 
ties are all but dead? There, there is "no good 
of life but love, but love." What, then, shall 
the sensualist, or the worldling, or the tyrant, 
find for his delight? What is there for him 
to cry, but — 

"Which way I fly is hell; 
Myself am hell"? 

Certain it is that a soul that finds no delight 
in God, can expect to find no delight anywhere 



170 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

in a world in which God is everywhere made 
plain. 

Some have seemed to think that with the 
passing of the body, the soul will instinctively 
turn to its true delight; and that in this way 
death may be an avenue of escape into life. 
It is true enough that the poor flesh clogs in 
every way; in mere weariness it spoils our 
work : in the insistence of its demands it checks 
our spirits. With it away, may we not hope 
that the soul will take a sudden flight God- 
ward? We would fain hope so; but what if 
the body, in its weariness, is a check to evil de- 
sire as well as a spur in its hours of energy? 
Baseness, ultimately, is a thing of the mind; 
and, maybe, the mind set free from the tram- 
mels of the weary flesh will only find itself 
more energetic in wrong desire than ever. 
And, then, what stony paths of renunciation 
will have to be trod, before we become the pure 
in heart who are able to see God? It will be 
a long, long trail, indeed. 



IMMORTALITY 171 

IV 
At the same time, the love of God remains. 

"His troth at all times firmly stood, 
And shall, from age to age, endure." 

And love means the instinct to redeem— to 
the uttermost and to the end. The loneliness 
and the final pain must have a redemption 
power in them; or we must confess God partly 
beaten. After all, there is something in all of 
us that can respond to God. That one great 
lesson comes to the Church from this war. 
"Black's soul of black, of that I saw no sam- 
ple." Beneath the thick layers of the dust of 
selfishness, the image of God, fashioned by the 
Great Artificer, remains to be uncovered in 
every soul. The sheep may stray far, but the 
Good Shepherd is not easily thwarted in His 
quest. The mountains in which they wander 
are high ; their chasms are deep. But His pa- 
tience is infinite ; and out through the sleet and 
the rain He goes, and seeking, seeks on — until 
He find. Wherefore, we may have good hope 
to comfort us. God is Love. Nevertheless, 
for us, now is the accepted time; now is the 
day of salvation. 



THE LAST ISSUE 



CHAPTER VIII 
The Last Issue 

THE hot sun beat down on the shadeless 
camp all through the summer day, and 
the heat reflected from white sand and corru- 
gated iron made the air tropical. But though 
the atmosphere of the long, low hut was sti- 
fling, and the service voluntary, yet every seat 
was packed, and at the back the men stood in 
a solid mass. Those who could not squeeze 
in, stood round the open windows. Here was 
reality; men met to hear a message as from 
the Unseen. They had already most of them 
been in the jaws of death, and they would soon 
return again to the shadow of the great 
mystery. There was in no eye that expression 
of patient endurance wherewith the preacher 
is so often confronted at home. A tense feel- 
ing of eagerness pervaded the hut while the 
preacher sought to marshal the arguments for 
the victory of life in the very act of death. 

175 



176 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

Death was only an experience as natural as 
birth. As the life entering this world found 
itself at home, so at the next stage would life 
be at home, with the preparations of love all 
made for its coming. And the address ended 
with the last words of Donald Hankey to his 
platoon ere he led them over the parapet to 
his death: "Men, if you are wounded it is 
Blighty; if you are killed it is the resurrec- 
tion." But at the close the unexpected con- 
fronted the preacher. A kilted, grim-faced 
Scot waited and asked this question: "Do 
you really believe that every soldier who dies 
in battle goes to heaven?" His fist was half 
clenched, but with his thumb he pointed up- 
ward. The spirit of all the Puritans glowed 
in his deep-set eyes. He made it clear that 
he had no use for such a gospel. He was a 
Christian and not a Mohammedan. His body 
was cheap — a shilling a day ; his life was cheap 
— mere fodder for guns; his self-respect re- 
quired that his soul should not be cheap. 
And a heaven gained through a splinter of 
shell would be but a cheap heaven indeed! 



THE LAST ISSUE 177 



It was thus that the preacher found himself 
up against a question which mere generalities 
were helpless to solve. The war has brought 
every question that affects human well-being 
to an issue ; and it lights up to their very depths 
those realms of religion which aforetime lay in 
shadow. The question to which the stern- 
faced soldier wanted an answer is this — what 
does really happen to the soldier who dies in 
battle? In other days the question found a 
ready answer; the believer went instantly to 
a heaven of bliss and the unbeliever to a hell 
of everlasting torment. It was a clear answer, 
grim, but logically unassailable on the prem- 
ises. It was an answer which evoked passion 
in the heart of him who preached. It was 
his to move men to make a choice on which 
eternity hung. In those days a man could 
preach as a dying man to dying men and sweep 
multitudes before the white heat of conviction 
into the fold. But few are now able to wield 
the sword of this stern doctrine. To consign 
the overwhelming majority of mankind to 



178 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

such a hell would only argue a malicious God. 
And it is no longer possible to speak of going 
down to hell or up to heaven. When the earth 
was the centre of the universe and the sun and 
the stars moved round it — that was possible. 
But now the earth is but a grain of sand in 
the immensities, and the heavens have become 
astronomical. There is now neither up nor 
down! But even if there were, can we con- 
ceive the soldier hurled from the hell of battle 
into an endless hell? Are men who never had 
a chance on earth to be deprived for ever of 
any chance? Doubtless many of them are men 
of sanguinary language and strange deeds ; but 
they are the products of a civilisation that 
herds men in slums and encircles them with 
every evil. They lived in grime, how could 
they be but grimy? Are they to be damned 
for the grime they did not create? But no 
grime of man's creation can hide the god-like 
in them. They laugh at misery; they go down 
to the earthly hell with a jest; they scorn death 
to save a comrade; and for dim ideals they 
lay down life itself right joyously. It is in- 
conceivable, whatever infallible theologians 
may say, that hell can be the portion of these. 



THE LAST ISSUE 179 

But it is equally inconceivable that lives so 
stained and marred can "immediately pass into 
glory." They would be very unhappy if they 
did ; for they would not feel at home. There is 
so much of good in them that hell cannot be 
their portion; and so much of evil that heaven 
cannot at once receive them. What then can 
be their lot? That is the problem wherewith 
the soldier whose eyes have the far-off mystic 
gaze and in whose blood abides still the iron of 
election and eternal reprobation, confronts the 
Church to-day, demanding an answer. 



II 



There are various Commissions of the 
Churches indulging in mental Swedish exer- 
cises, striving to clarify the ways of God to the 
mist-dimmed eyes of men. This surely is a 
question worthy of their grappling. What 
has become of the soldier whom neither the 
heaven nor the hell of the pre-war theology 
can receive? There are seven millions dead, 
and twenty millions jousting still with death, 
and no man can see the end. Every other 
question pales before this of the destiny of 



180 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

these millions. The revolution made by war 
in the social organism brings in its train a revo- 
lution in the realm of the soul. The Church 
must find a third category. It must pro- 
pound not only a doctrine of heaven and of 
hell but also a doctrine of an intermediate 
state. 

All the facts of life as we know them point 
to the reasonableness of this third category — 
of that state after death that cannot be hell, 
and is not the full triumph over evil that is 
heaven. For all the processes of God are the 
slow working of evolution. It took aeons — 
periods of time so vast that the brain reels 
when it tries to grasp them — for the earth to 
become solid for the feet of men; and still 
further aaons for the soul to grasp the chasm 
that separates right and wrong. By what 
slow and gradual steps did men advance to- 
wards the knowledge of God! Ebbtide there 
as everywhere succeeded the flow; but each 
floodtide registered a little higher than the one 
before. There doubtless have been periods of 
crisis when men advanced towards the stars a 
thousand leagues in one day. There was such 
a period nineteen centuries ago, and doubtless 



THE LAST ISSUE 181 

another such will come again. But the normal 
working in the development of man is the slow 
growth that needs not to be hurried because 
eternity is inexhaustible. And the Unseen 
Ruler Who reigns here in time is the same 
Who reigns yonder in the realm that to us is 
still veiled. He cannot have one law here and 
another there. If here a man moves towards 
goodness by gradual evolution, that process 
will inevitably be continued in the next stage 
of that road that leads on endlessly beyond the 
shadow, and beyond our imagination — "the 
moon-lit, endless way." Just as boys who pass 
from one school to another take up their tasks 
where they left off, some lower down and some 
higher up according to their development, so 
will it be in the great school of life beyond. 
There the life suddenly ended on earth, will 
take up the interrupted task of its discipline 
and development. The soldier who, like all 
his comrades, spurned the cheap narcotic that 
would assure heaven to all men dying in battle 
was quite right. It is the heroic in the soul 
that spurns such opiates. But, if the soldier 
takes up life yonder just as he laid it down 
here, then this can be further said. The high- 



182 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

est we know of the Unseen Governor of the 
universe is a love that will even die for His 
children. And in the hour of death, these His 
children, content to be blotted out on earth 
that their country might live and their kindred 
be free, touched with groping hands the 
Father's fairest raiment. They launched 
forth on the illimitable sea with the course set 
God-ward. We can say that, and need not 
shrink from saying it. But what further rocks 
and shoals imperil the voyage, who can say? 

Ill 

Here the doubt has come whether this 
answer, which I have so laboriously striven 
to give to my compatriot's question, would sat- 
isfy him. For in some trench, under the stars, 
there doubtless came to him, through the very 
vapour of death, such a glimpse of the Right- 
eousness and unswerving Justice throned at 
the core of things that hell itself became a 
reality — a necessary provision for the cleans- 
ing of the world. Perhaps he felt that, en- 
dowed with the gift of freedom, he had an 
inalienable right to be damned if he chose. 



THE LAST ISSUE 183 

"Am I then deprived of my right as a free 
man?" he might ask; "is there then no vindi- 
cation of eternal righteousness — no hell?" Of 
course there is a hell. It can be seen. Here 
there is impenetrable barbed wire round about 
it ; everywhere there are the steel walls of isola- 
tion shutting in its denizens, be they here or 
there. There is no glory of sacrifice for the 
man in hell. It is the impoverished life, empty 
of good, blinded to the ideal. But as in the 
hell here, so also in the hell beyond. Even in 
hell, there can be no complete isolation from 
God. For hell itself is within the compass of 
His omnipresence, and the man who makes his 
bed there at last is brought through anguish to 
say: "lo, Thou art here." God is also in hell, 
and wherever He is He can only be doing one 
thing — trying to win His children to Himself. 
That is what is meant by the footnote in his- 
tory that tells how one went aforetime to 
preach to the "spirits in prison." It visual- 
izes the fact that however far the soul may 
wander, it can never go beyond the reach of the 
Almighty Arm, or the pleading of His love. 
It is only a pagan idea that the destiny of 
immortal souls can be eternally fixed in a 



184 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

moment of time. The glory of man is that he 
is free. And his freedom he carries hence. 
Otherwise death would only transform him into 
an automaton. He must be free, there as here, 
to fall away from the road that leads to 
splendour; free also to lift his eyes heaven- 
ward in the midst of hell — free, even there, to 
say: "I will arise and go to my Father." And 
in the long, long end God will Win. The 
eternal harmony will at last be broken by the 
crying of not even one lost soul. Though the 
road for many leadeth to hell, it goes through 
it and cannot end there. 

IV 

If these things be true (or rather if they be 
in the way of the truth, for what the absolute 
truth itself is no man kuoweth) then a further 
question emerges — that of our duty towards 
the dead. If their eternal destiny be not fixed 
unalterably in that moment of time when the 
soul parts from the body; if God be still 
striving to win them to Himself and to lead 
them to the clearer vision and the more excel- 
lent glory; then, surely, they are not passed 



THE LAST ISSUE 185 

beyond the sphere of our help nor the reach of 
our prayers. They are still bound up with us 
in the fellowship of one common faith. 
''Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or 
whether we die we die unto the Lord." Those 
who die and those who live are serving the 
one Lord; in heaven and on earth the rapture 
of faith is one : "Worthy is the Lamb that was 
slain to receive power and riches and wisdom 
and strength and honour and glory and bless- 
ing." And the fullness of their felicity is de- 
pendent upon us, for God has so ordained that 
"apart from us they should not be made per- 
fect." 

We can realise this dependence of the dead 
on the living when we think how they are 
watching the course of that great conflict in 
which they laid down their lives. We are left 
to wage the fight surrounded by the dead: 
"the great cloud of witnesses." If our courage 
failed and our spirit flagged, so that the cause 
of the world's freedom was lost through an 
indecisive peace, there would be for them the 
sense of failure, the knowledge that they had 
died in vain. Without us, therefore, they can- 
not be made perfect in the felicity of triumph 



186 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

over the evil that threatens to overwhelm the 
world. Were all other motives to fail this 
would fire our hearts and steel our wills — the 
motive of loyalty to the dead. The seer heard 
the souls under the altar cry with a great voice 
saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, 
dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on 
them that dwell on the earth. . . . And it was 
said unto them that they should rest yet a little 
while, until their fellow-servants also and their 
brethren which should be killed even as they 
were, should have fulfilled their course." The 
consummation of the felicity of the dead thus 
depends on those still left on earth and on the 
manner in which they shall face the last enemy 
— death. 

But the duty to the dead cannot be restricted 
to our carrying to a triumphant issue the cause 
for which they died. As Christians it involves 
far more than that. If prayer be the mightiest 
weapon placed in our hands, we dare not re- 
strict its power merely to the aid of the living. 
For the dead also are still on the same great 
stream of life as we are. And they, too, need 
the shepherding and the shielding of God. 

We realise in some dim way how prayer on 



THE LAST ISSUE 187 

behalf of the living can help and inspire. And 
there is the same reason for thinking that 
prayer can help the dead. For prayer is the 
unloosening of the Divine energy. And the 
dead are as the living, within the fold of the 
one enveloping God. If a mother's prayer 
may mean that a new inspiration can come to 
her son in the trenches, and a new resolve to 
follow after God, surely a mother's prayer 
may also mean a fuller sense of God coming 
to her son within the veil; and if he be far 
away, the resolution may rise in his heart: "I 
will arise and go to my Father." 

We know regarding the dead that they pray 
for the living; for we read of "the golden vials 
full of odours which are the prayers of saints." 
And this is so natural that we instinctively 
know it to be true. The mother who prayed 
for her children on earth, goes on praying for 
them in heaven. It is impossible that death 
could congeal the prayers of love on her lips. 
If through their prayers there come to us hope 
and vision and guidance, how dare we cease 
directing the forces of prayer towards them? 
For they are not yet perfected. For them, 
too, difficulties may emerge, and stretches of 



188 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

dim valleys may have to be passed. If they 
be still free (and we cannot think that death 
can so pauperise as to make men mere autom- 
ata) they may still have to face peril. For 
heaven is not a place where men cannot sin, 
but rather a place where they do not want to 
sin. And we cannot err in that — in asking for 
our beloved dead that they may never more 
want to sin. 

One may well have doubts regarding prayer 
being of any efficacy in behalf of the dead. 
But there is no room for doubting that such 
prayer would be a great help to the living 
themselves who would thus pray. For it 
would mean that Immortality would emerge 
from the shadowy realm to which we have con- 
signed it, and become again a great reality. 
For many the hope of Immortality ceased to 
be of value, and heaven ceased to be an operat- 
ing factor in life, and this came because the 
living cut themselves off from the dead. How 
does any place that we have never seen be- 
come real to us? It is when persons we love 
go hither and we keep in touch with them. 
For many a mother far away among the voice- 
less hills, the city she has never seen is real 



THE LAST ISSUE 189 

because her son is there. She too walks its 
streets, and her spirit moves amid the throngs, 
because her heart is ever with him. But if on 
the day he left home the iron gateway closed 
and no messages passed from her to him or 
from him to her, the city of his dwelling would 
be a mere shadow to her. And that is how 
heaven no longer is real. We have allowed 
the gates to close; the dead are shut out from 
our lives; no message goes from us, and they 
are isolated by the barriers which we erect. 
That earth may again be made radiant for us 
with the glory of immortality we must open 
the windows of the soul towards our dead. 
We must direct our thought, our will, our love 
toward them in the great stream of prayer. 
Then will the life beyond the shadow of death 
shine forth again refulgent upon our souls, 
and everything on earth shall appear but small 
and valueless compared to that radiance of 
deathless life shining from the gates ajar. To 
this there is an objection which may seem in- 
superable to some. It is that in other ages 
great evils sprang from prayers for the dead. 
And no doubt this was so. But great evils 
sprang from other sources also, yet we did not 



190 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

dam up these sources for ever. Preaching has 
often been misused, but the Word is still pro- 
claimed, living and powerful. The Sacra- 
ment of our Lord's Body and Blood has been 
at times violently dealt with and made the min- 
ister of superstition, but the Table has ever 
continued to be spread in the wilderness and 
the souls of men have ever been fed with the liv- 
ing bread. And if prayers for the dead have 
meant at times indulgences and an unholy 
traffic, that is no excuse why we should cease 
from such prayers for ever. We have come 
to such a stage of discernment that we can 
surely distinguish between the pure gold and 
the base accretions that dim its shining. To 
continue doing violence to one of the noblest 
instincts of the heart is to surrender a preroga- 
tive of the soul to the memory of evils long 
vanished. This is not the time to allow the 
dead hand of far-away abuses to stifle our 
souls. The heart of the people has passed be- 
yond that stage. Multitudes to-day pray for 
their dead in an agony of supplication who 
never before prayed even for the living; and 
the Church must give expression to this yearn- 
ing of their souls. 



THE LAST ISSUE 191 

Whatever the theorisings of theologians may 
say, the heart of man settles this matter. And 
the heart sends out its cry beyond the portal of 
death, and see,ks to bless and succour its own. 

"Were I hanged on the highest hill, 
Mother o' mine, mother o' mine, 
I know whose love would follow me still, 
Mother o' mine, mother o' mine. 

"Were I damned both body and soul, 
Mother o' mine, mother o* mine. 
I know whose prayers would make me whole, 
Mother o' mine, mother o' mine." 

This is the cry of the heart, and the heart is 
in life and death a safer guide than syllogisms. 
"Wherefore let our voice rise like a fountain 
for them night and day." 



THE CHURCH 



CHAPTER IX 
The Church 

IT would be idle to pretend that the majority 
of our soldiers are in any vital connection 
with the Church; and it would be as idle to 
deny that a large number have various criti- 
cisms to offer concerning its present condition. 
Both these facts must give pause to all zealous 
Churchmen, to whatever communion they be- 
long. For with our soldiers we are not deal- 
ing with any particular class, but with the 
young manhood of the nation ; and if they are, 
as they are, in considerable proportion aloof 
from and critical of the great Christian society, 
there is probably room for improvement in the 
society as well as in them. Much of the criti- 
cism, no doubt, is paltry and misinformed. 
"The wealth of the clergy" (as distinguished 
from bishops) was once made a ground of 
complaint — a not very stable ground in fact. 
But, beyond all such types of objection, there 
remained the solid facts that the Church had 

195 



196 GOD AND, THE SOLDIER 

apparently failed to hold within herself her 
own baptized members, and that a vague irri- 
tation with her as ineffectual was singularly 
prevalent. 

Nor was this peculiar to the private soldier. 
I have been a member of several messes, and 
discovered the same attitude of neglect of the 
Church as a living force very frequent in the 
minds of officers. One began to understand 
why, apart from scriptural grounds, the Church 
is described as "she." Not that, as an insti- 
tution, the Church arouses violent hostility. 
Worse than that, she may be ignored. Her 
continued existence on the whole seemed to be 
desired. She provides a source of agreeable 
soothing in the midst of sterner and more real 
experiences. She offers a something, to which 
a gentleman should have a chance of turning, 
every now and then. After all, babies have to 
be christened ; people have to be married ; there 
are such things as funerals; and an organisa- 
tion should exist for the rites of religion, that 
they may be conducted in a graceful kind of 
way. But when it comes to matters of living 
importance, then High Finance is a serious 
thing; the great political parties are serious 



THE CHURCH 197 

things ; the Labour movement is a very serious 
thing — but the Church matters not at all. 
The fact is, these men are not afraid of the 
Church ; though days were once when its word 
was a word of power. 

Elsewhere, there was to be found a deeper 
note of separation — a hint of a disappointment 
with an institution which might be so potent 
and seemed so impotent. The social inequali- 
ties that persist; the rampant evils, which are 
apparently attacked only with words ; the war 
itself — all these were quoted against the 
Church as a force. And with reason; for if 
Christianity is anything it is a power. "The 
power of God unto salvation" was the chal- 
lenging description of it given long ago by 
the most virile of all Christians. And organ- 
ised Christianity ought to be the strongest or- 
ganised power in the world. Whereas, at 
present, it frankly is not; and men, who wish 
that it were, are impatient of its impotence. 
"Jesus Christ I revere," said a man once, "but 
I'm sick of the Church." 

One of the noblest descriptions of the ideal 
Church ever penned is given in terms of Art. 
The writer conceived of a vast Temple, fash- 



198 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

ioned of living stones, based upon one founda- 
tion surely laid, which is Jesus Christ — which, 
in its great distances and noble proportions 
might be fit habitation for God Himself; a 
building worthy of the Most High. Thus cer- 
tain tests may be applied to the Church as we 
know it, whereby we may discover some of the 
directions in which the structure has gone 
awry. For good art may be discussed by the 
application of the tests of Fitness, Economy 
(which includes Liberality) and Sympathy. 
If the Church cannot pass these tests, she is 
not the noble building of which the Apostle 
dreamed; and we must set ourselves to recon- 
struction in the aspects wherein, by them, she 
is proved to fail. 



If we would judge of the worth of any 
object of art, we must first ask ourselves what 
end it is intended to serve. If it is not ade- 
quate to that end — if it has no "functional 
beauty" — as a piece of art it is a failure. Its 
end, indeed, may simply be loveliness and noth- 
ing else — like that amazing tower of Giotto's 



THE CHURCH 199 

in Florence, that springs like a flower from 
the earth, and by the delight that it gives to the 
eye alone justifies itself. But most creations 
of man serve more mundane purposes; and, 
however mundane they be, it is by these pur- 
poses that first they must be judged. A chair, 
for instance, may be most cunningly inlaid with 
ivory; but it is a bad chair, unless a man can 
sit on it. A clock may be ornamented with 
excellent skill in all manner of precious 
metals ; but what we first demand of a clock is 
that it should tell the time ; and, if the decora- 
tions render the reading of the time difficult, 
they are bad decorations. An honest locomo- 
tive, constructed at Derby or Crewe, may be 
held to be a much more artistic creation than a 
dining table, whose legs are carved with all 
manner of carvings, round which no one can 
sit in decent comfort to dine. 

First, then, we are to get a grip of the end 
for which any given object is fashioned; and 
we ask, what is the Church for? She has a 
purpose, surely; by her adequacy to the pur- 
pose let her stand or fall. 

Now, the statement of her purpose is simple. 
It is threefold. First, she exists to worship 



200 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

God; next, to develop Christian life amongst 
Christians; and, third, to extend Christ's 
kingdom. In proportion as she does these 
things, she passes the first test suggested by 
the conception of her as a Temple. 

Few will take exception to the statement 
that the first duty of the Church is to worship 
God; nor will many deny that that is a 
supremely important and valuable function. 
On the whole, the Church has aimed at meeting 
its responsibilities here. The Sunday services 
have been the occasions when the Church has 
insisted on its pre-eminence over other organi- 
sations claiming the attention of the commun- 
ity; and the strength of the clergy and min- 
isters has very considerably been expended in 
making these services as living and genuine as 
they knew how to make them. 

At the same time, weakness has been shown 
here; and we may not be too confident that 
the war has not increased the difficulties which 
oppose the great worship-purpose of the 
Church. In pre-war days, a tendency was 
shown in some communions to use the Sunday 
Service as an opportunity, not merely for the 
advancement of the claims of a sect, but for ac- 



THE CHURCH 201 

tive party-political propaganda. Elsewhere, 
respect for the traditions of the fathers had re- 
duced what ought to be the living vividness of 
worship to a deadly dreariness, which was a 
burden to the spirit. Both of these tendencies 
were rightly disastrous, for they were adversely 
affecting the first purpose for which the 
Church exists. Many of us may not agree 
with the aims of some of our fellow-Christians 
in the Anglican Church; but we cannot but 
admit that they have done a service to us all in 
emphasising the first-class importance of wor- 
ship in itself. They have helped to recreate 
in British minds a sense of the necessity of 
the "worshipfulness of worship"; and, while 
some of us may think that in their emphasis 
on the means they have forgotten the end, and 
that care for the symbol may obscure the great 
principle that all true worship must be in spirit 
and in truth, none of us can deny that they 
have done us admirable service in calling us 
back from an emphasis on passing ecclesiastical 
squabbles, or on political questions about which 
our prejudices are keen, to a remembrance of 
the fact that in worshipping God it is God 
that we are worshipping; and that no effort 



202 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

after living dignity and beauty in that enter- 
prise is misplaced or ill-spent. 

The need for the witness thus borne is not 
passing away with the war. Indeed, in some 
ways it is only being accentuated. We may 
confidently expect a large demand for "bright" 
services in days to come, of the P. S. A. type, 
on the ground that only thus can we hold the 
men ; and evidence will not be lacking to sup- 
port the contention. The conditions of divine 
worship on active service are wholly abnormal, 
even in the base camps; and there has been an 
almost inevitable yielding to the tendency to 
make the voluntary services, at least, as enter- 
taining as possible. The men are tired, and 
the unnaturalness and monotony of the condi- 
tions in which they live call for something of a 
very free and easy kind if they are to be at- 
tracted on a Sunday evening into a hut for 
divine worship. Therefore let us have a 
religious sing-song, and an address, which 
should be earnest, but must be spicy. There 
can be no question that these informal religious 
gatherings have often been enormously suc- 
cessful from the point of view of numbers. A 
good band, and a speaker with skill in address- 



THE CHURCH 203 

ing men, who does not disdain the frequent use 
of humour, will pack a hut anywhere with 
soldiers. The inference drawn is that the 
Church has to learn its lesson here. For the 
future, the older dignities and beauties of wor- 
ship must be jettisoned; and services which 
are a cross between a prayer-meeting and an 
entertainment put in their place. 

Nor need we imagine that this plea will be 
unsupported by returning soldiers themselves. 
Many of them frankly enjoy the kind of ex- 
citement and freedom that a crowded service 
in a hut affords. The addresses, moreover, 
have been largely of a sort to attract their 
attention. Specially selected men have been 
giving their whole time to the work, often men 
of real power, and always men with a gift of 
striking and entertaining speech, who never 
forget that the first and last commandment 
for a speaker is "thou shalt not be dull." Con- 
sequently, when the soldier returns to his little 
village church, and hears the still pleasantness 
of Evensong, or the solemn quiet of a High- 
land service, together with a sermon during 
which he may conceivably become drowsy, he 
may very likely make unfavourable contrasts 



204 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

with what he remembers of Sunday evenings 
in France. The appetite for anything that 
excites is easily developed, and a demand is 
quite certain to arise for the scrapping of the 
restraints of worship, and the introduction of 
services the chief aim of which is cheeriness. 
Against that attitude of mind, those who 
care for the real work of the Church must be 
on their guard. The assumptions on which 
the demand will be based are themselves un- 
sound. For the chief of them is that you must 
estimate the value of an act of worship by 
counting heads. A manifest fallacy, which has 
done enough harm to worship already. That 
there is a real religious value of an evangelistic 
type in such services no one who has seen much 
of them can deny. But that it is proportionate 
to the audience no one can justly assert. The 
huts are filled not by worshippers, but by men 
who are all dressed up and have nowhere to go. 
A well-known Scottish chaplain commented 
with gratification on the huge audience that 
awaited him one evening, to a fellow-coun- 
tryman who stood by the door as he entered. 
"Och! we'd gang onywhere on a nicht like 
this," was the reply. In abnormal conditions 



THE CHURCH 205 

abnormal methods must be used; but for the 
steady work of the Church in days of peace, 
the ageless objects must be kept steadily in 
view. And the first object of the Church is 
not to "'cater" for the men. It is to worship 
God — the God Who inhabits eternity, whose 
Name is holy. And we may be perfectly cer- 
tain that all the graver sections of our return- 
ing men, those sections that will count for 
religion in days to come, are expecting to find 
the note of solemn reverence and of mystery 
deepened in the public rites of the Church. 
They have learned much of the strange won- 
der of life; they have come close to its solem- 
nities ; and they know that the God of life is a 
great God, high and lifted up. While we may 
easily attract the thoughtless by cheaper 
methods (provided the local picture-house is 
not open), we shall alienate those who are the 
backbone of the nation if we turn away from 
the dignity which should mark our approach 
to God. 

Let the Church, then, first set itself to a 
great enterprise of worship. The form is a 
small thing, compared with the spirit; but the 
form should express the spirit. Reverence, 



206 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

solemnity, devotion, dignity — these must be 
there. Let art give of the best it can : let each 
worshipper, in his prepared heart, give of the 
best he can; so that as each Lord's Day comes, 
every one who enters a House of God shall not 
leave it without having had brought back to 
his remembrance that the Lord is great and 
greatly to be feared. 

When we consider the other ends of the 
Church, anxieties no less justified arise. We 
have evidently failed to deepen the Christian 
life of Christian people as we should — else why 
is it that such an experience as the war has 
not developed a keener religious spirit? And 
we have failed, considerably, to keep our own 
young people. Many of those whose attach- 
ment to the Church is of the slackest were 
brought up in touch with Church life. What 
is necessary here is a great increase of lay 
pastoral work. A minister of a large parish 
cannot possibly be in that close and intimate 
touch with his young people that is so desirable. 
The Scottish system of the eldership affords 
the best hope for intimate work. But it must 
be a real, and not a paper, eldership. To 
secure that, it must be largely augmented. 



THE CHURCH 207 



The best men to undertake the work are nearly 
always very busy men; and they have not 
time to assist their minister in pastoral work 
over large areas. But they can interest them- 
selves in, say, a dozen families. If lay assist- 
ance could be secured to this extent much might 
be done to watch growing boys and girls, and 
to keep the minister in touch with cases where 
he can be of most service. Certain it is that 
pastoral work of that kind must be greatly 
increased in the days that lie ahead, and that 
the ministry cannot overtake it all. 

An at least equally important point for 
consideration is whether the various branches 
of the Church are making the right use of the 
Holy Communion. The opinions of chaplains 
and other clerical workers amongst soldiers 
contradict each other on many points as to 
the effect the war has had on the religious life 
of fighting-men, but there is an impressive 
agreement that the great Sacrament has come 
to signify more to them, and that Presbyterian 
and Nonconformist communions must alter 
their practices in relation to it. It has come 
to be seen afresh as the supremest of all occa- 
sions in the ordinary life of the Church, in 



GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



which a man may draw nigh to God and be sat- 
isfied of the Real Presence of his Saviour. In 
the quaint words of an Edinburgh preacher of 
long ago, whereas by the Word we have hold 
of Christ as it were betwixt our finger and our 
thumb, in the Sacrament we get hold of Him 
with our whole hand. It is recognised as an 
unique opportunity of obtaining "singular 
medicine for sick souls." Here, again, we are 
indebted to Anglicanism for restoring the cen- 
tral Christian rite to its proper place, although 
there seem to be tendencies at present within 
that branch of the Church which are undoing 
the good that has been done. Choral celebra- 
tions, with few or no communicants, especially 
if they oust matins from their rightful place 
on Sunday morning, are a mishandling of the 
Lord's Supper. They make it an act of wor- 
ship chiefly; which, indeed, it is, but by no 
means solely. It is an occasion when Christian 
people may, by faith, partake of the Body and 
Blood of Christ; and a Communion apart 
from communicants is a contradiction in terms. 
At the same time, members of the Scottish 
Church and the English Nonconformist 
Churches have need to consider whether their 



THE CHURCH 209 

habit of comparatively infrequent opportunity 
of participating is not injurious to their Church 
life. In Scotland, the practice of four or six 
celebrations is still frequent. That seems al- 
most the worst arrangement that can be de- 
vised. Either hold the Sacrament very rarely, 
say twice a year, and make it the culmination 
of a series of special services, as is still done 
in the Highlands; or have it very frequently, 
so that when a man is heavy-hearted he can 
immediately turn thereto for healing and new 
hope. Our branches of the Church are sup- 
posed to be rooted in the Word and the Sacra- 
ments ; but at present, it is on the weekly Word 
and the occasional Sacrament that we found 
ourselves. 

Moreover, why should Holy Communion be 
hedged about with all the ecclesiastical barbed- 
wire which at present fences it? There is 
much to be said for the open Communion. 
The purity of Church membership can be 
secured in endless other ways than by using 
entrance to the Lord's Table as the test. Why 
should the responsibility for the genuineness 
of participation not be laid upon the communi- 
cant rather than on the Church ? Why should 



210 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

the invitation to partake not be to all who love 
the Lord Jesus in sincerity and in truth? 
There is something almost grotesque in the 
little tickets that have to be presented in Scot- 
tish churches by intending communicants be- 
fore they can take their places in the church. 
There is something more than grotesque in the 
English rule that only Anglican members can 
receive the Bread and Wine. As if the Lord's 
Table were by law established only for those 
who see eye to eye with the skilful compromis- 
ers who kept the Reformation in England 
somewhere in the safe middle between Yea 
and Nay. The love of God is very wide: the 
sacred elements are its symbol; the blood-red 
wine is for sinners that are in distress, and de- 
sire help; and it is hard to understand why 
the Church should be at such pains to keep the 
needy back from the supplies that can satisfy 
them that hunger and thirst for a worthier life, 
and a greater progress in grace in days to 
come. 

One thing is certain; many a returning sol- 
dier, remembering days when death was his 
near companion, and the help that came to him 
from little Communion services, at which none 



THE CHURCH 211 

of the restrictions held good, will ask from his 
Church wide and ample opportunities to 
strengthen his soul around the Table, that he 
may be enabled to keep the vows which, on 
the field of battle, he paid unto the Lord. 



II 



And now to return to our original image, 
leaving, for the moment, consideration of the 
third end of the Church — the extension of the 
kingdom. An object of art deserves its title, 
not only if it passes the test of fitness — the 
test, that is to say, of being adequate to the 
end which it was fashioned to serve. It also 
must pass the tests of Economy and of Sym- 
pathy. For our present purposes we may take 
these two together. Both deal with the use 
and treatment of material. The former signi- 
fies that the material must be proportionately 
used ; the latter that it shall be sympathetically 
treated. If, for instance, on a brass chande- 
lier, there is a mass of ornamentation that over- 
loads, that is a waste of good brass, though 
each piece of ornamentation considered alone 
may be not unpleasing; and the whole fails 



212 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

when tested by the principle of Economy. 
But Economy includes Liberality; while there 
must not be too much, there must be enough. 
The most famous offender against this canon 
was the boatswain who spoiled the ship for 
want of a pennyworth of tar. He may have 
been a good boatswain ; but he was a bad artist. 

On the other hand, the test of sympathy 
is a very subtle one. It asks that the artificer 
shall understand the nature of the material 
in which he works; that he shall have studied 
its capabilities, and have trained his eye and 
hand to make the most of them. Iron must 
be treated in one way ; wood in another ; granite 
and sandstone need different handling from 
one another, and both from marble. A for- 
tiori, the treatment to be accorded to all these 
is distinct from that which is due to flesh and 
blood. 

And how does the Temple which is the 
Church come out of it, when tested by these 
principles? The only answer that can be 
given by any loyal son of the Church is one 
of humiliation and shame. Wild prodigality 
of material is seen in one place; the poorest 
kind of scrimping in another, and that where 



THE CHURCH 213 

liberality is most needed. And the material 
itself is abused. Probably in no sphere of life 
are there so many square pegs in round holes 
as in the Church, having been placed there in 
the name of a spurious democracy. There are 
men all over Britain, who began a Christian 
ministry with high hopes and a genuine, wist- 
ful desire to work for the kingdom, who now 
carry on with the dogged look on their faces of 
the man whose blessedness it is to expect noth- 
ing. And yet these men might be happy and 
useful elsewhere; but the Church has no 
machinery for transplanting them. And as 
they suffer, so their members suffer with them ; 
and the Church as a whole is devitalised. 

Now, there is one root cause of the former 
evil, that of the uneconomic use of Christian 
material. And that lies in our miserable divi- 
sions. One of the first duties of a Christian 
man is to work for Christian unity. The re- 
sults of division are becoming tragic, both in 
England and Scotland. In the latter country, 
I know of a population of probably less than 
2,000 ministered to by six churches, which hate 
each other heartily in the name of principle; 
and on the other side of the picture there is 



214 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

Glasgow, with needs that cry aloud to heaven 
for wise and co-operative effort, which at pres- 
ent, in many of its districts, is all but un- 
touched, despite much honest effort. The 
Church is a lop-sided Temple in Scotland. 
And who will say that things are better in 
England? Notoriously, the divisions are le- 
gion: each one struggling for its own life, 
when all should be struggling for the Kingdom 
of God. 

Fortunately, this night of division is yield- 
ing to the dawn. Already, the mountain-tops 
are touched with rosy fingers. Men are com- 
ing to realise that schism is a sin ; and the grace 
of God is enabling us to overcome even our 
prejudices. We are beginning to see that ob- 
stinacy is not necessarily strength, and that oc- 
casionally, what we call fidelity to ecclesiastical 
principle is only another name for obduracy. 
We must be united, or confess ourselves beaten 
by the devil. In our enterprises for union, 
we shall find much help from soldiers. They 
have seen our divisions from afar off, and seen 
them small. It was sometimes delightful, and 
sometimes almost pitiful, to remark how tiny 
seemed our Scottish walls of partition in 



THE CHURCH 215 



France ; and often a kind of rage came into the 
heart that they were permitted to continue for 
another day. Certainly, the soldiers took no 
heed of them, and all the influence they have 
will be cast for their demolition. 

At the same time, we have to acknowledge 
that they are there, and that they will not fall, 
like the walls of Jericho, by the mere blowing 
of trumpets. Grandiose schemes of complete 
Christian unity are constructed only of the 
fabric of a dream. One golden rule must be 
observed. Each branch of the Church must 
unite with that which is nearest to it : and thus, 
slowly, the scattered fragments may be gath- 
ered together. And for that work we have the 
inspiration of an immediate clamant call — the 
call of the east-end of great cities. It is a 
moral monstrosity that little communities 
should retain men and substance in rivalry, 
when the great multitudes are starving for the 
bread of life. The dream of social recon- 
struction contains within it the necessity for 
the readjustment of Christian agencies accord- 
ing to the new needs of the land. And these 
can only rightly be secured in proportion to 
the banishment of ecclesiastical competition. 



215 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

Every Christian patriot must be a worker for 
Christian unity. 

Meantime, the war is serving this end in pro- 
viding unique opportunities for men of differ- 
ent ecclesiastical outlooks coming to know each 
other. Some of our separations are partly 
due to lack of social intermingling; and the 
fact that Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists 
are flung together, not only in the Army, but 
in the work of the huts, is wholly to the good. 
It is not an uncommon spectacle to see a High 
Church priest, who at home wears a biretta 
and has the "six points" in his church, and a 
Baptist minister, who is a passive resister, stok- 
ing boilers together at four o'clock in the morn- 
ing, in order to provide tea for troops going 
up the line. They come to know each other 
and to respect each other, and ultimately to 
discuss churchmanship together. Not that 
they come to any conclusion; both remain of 
the same opinion still ; but their intercourse has 
sown a seed of personal regard which may bear 
fair flowers in later days. 

Moreover, experience in co-operation has 
taught us to avoid one dangerous pitfall — to 
wit, that Christian unity can be furthered on 



THE CHURCH 217 

undenominational lines. A considerable num- 
ber of earnest people at one time imagined 
that it was possible to obtain corporate action 
on the basis of the points on which all Chris- 
tians are agreed: and that an undenomina- 
tional form of service could be discovered in 
which all could unite. That has proved an 
illusion. The undenominational service turned 
out to be a watered-down Nonconformist serv- 
ice; and the least common factor of all the 
sections of the Church, which was to be the 
basis of the united Church of the future, 
proved to be a singularly minute factor eccle- 
siastically. Hence have we learned that there 
is only one hope for ultimate re-union in Eng- 
land ; namely, that Episcopal and non-Episco- 
pal Churches should be true to themselves, each 
giving their separate contributions to the com- 
mon weal with both hands earnestly; on the 
understanding that each wishes the other God- 
speed in its work for the kingdom. It will be 
a great gain to the religious atmosphere of 
Britain if, seeing that serious differences exist, 
we can agree to differ. It is one thing to say, 
"this is my Church; and let all others be as the 
Samaritans": and quite another to say, "this 



218 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

is my Church, and I will give it my heart's best 
service; but that is my brother's Church, and 
may God use him and it for His kingdom!" 
It is one thing to announce, scornfully, "I 
take this way, which is the only right way; 
if you take that way, we part company for 
good": and quite another to grip your fellow- 
Christian's hand, saying, "I take this way, for 
I can no other ; you take that way, for you can 
no other; but both go in a similar direction: 
please God, they will meet a little further on." 
It will make a vital difference to England, if 
Anglican and Nonconformist can regard each 
other thus in the future. The war, certainly, 
has given both a wonderful chance to look at 
each other with the eyes of a new charity. 

It is always well to give honour where 
honour is due; and no one who knows the 
facts can deny that much of the credit for the 
better atmosphere of understanding which is 
being created lies at the door of an institution, 
which is not a Church, and does not claim to 
be one, but the desire of which is to serve all 
Churches — namely, the Y. M. C. A. That 
organisation possesses a very valuable asset in 
the good-will of literally millions of soldiers; 



THE CHURCH 219 



and it might easily have erected itself into an 
institution apart from the Churches, or, to 
state the matter more accurately, as a rival 
Church, framed on simpler lines than those 
already existing. Men were beginning to 
think of it almost as a Church; some, for in- 
stance, entered themselves on cards, on which 
they had to state their denominational alle- 
giance, as belonging to the Y. M. C. A. But 
its sagacious leaders decided against any such 
policy, and determined instead that it should 
put itself and its resources at the service of the 
whole Church, offering every communion 
equal facilities within its doors; making itself 
not undenominational, or extra-denomina- 
tional, but inter-denominational, in the truest 
sense of that term. Thereby, it has drawn 
into its ranks clergy and members of all man- 
ner of branches of the Church, and has proved, 
by actual experiment, the feasibility of co- 
operation on denominational lines. Inasmuch 
as, after the war, it will possess enormously 
enhanced prestige and be able to draw upon 
vast reserves of support, churchmen of various 
schools should consider seriously how far they 
can use it under peace conditions to assist ulti- 



220 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

mate unity. An institution that, in fact as 
well as in name, is the common meeting-place 
of Anglicans and non- Anglicans, neither of 
whom belittle their ecclesiastical position by 
availing themselves of its facilities, would be 
an enormous gain to the country — and, not 
least in the smaller town, in the times of stress 
for religion that are sure to come with peace. 
If the Church neglects the help which such an 
organisation can give towards unity she will 
have much to answer for. 

One grave point, however, remains to be 
considered. The union of the two great 
branches of Presbyterianism in Scotland must 
be a thing of to-morrow, and English Non- 
conformity may be at least federated the day 
after. A kindlier spirit of understanding and 
willingness to co-operate is already showing 
itself between both these branches of the 
Church and the Church of England; but not 
much will be done in developing it, and there 
may be rapid retrogression to the old attitude 
of suspicious rivalry, if the question of inter- 
communion is not settled. If we cannot meet 
before the altar, our courtesies are a mere thin 



THE CHURCH 221 

veneer covering hostilities that is serious in- 
deed. 

Here again the soldier may help us. He is 
a plain, blunt man, unversed in ecclesiastical 
subtleties ; but he has a keen sense of the com- 
mon-sense of things. And I am convinced 
that the vast majority of genuine Anglicans 
in the army would never dream that it was 
unseemly for, let us say, a Presbyterian to 
share with them in their celebration; or that 
they were committing mortal sin in participa- 
ting in a celebration according to the Scottish 
usage. As a matter of fact, the exigencies of 
active service have often compelled things of 
the kind to be done; and I hardly met an 
Anglican priest who, when faced with the ques- 
tion whether he would refuse the Sacrament 
to a Presbyterian soldier going into battle, 
who could not reach a chaplain of his own per- 
suasion, replied in the negative. I have my- 
self received the Sacrament in France at the 
hands of an Anglican clergyman, along with 
an admixture of English Wesleyans, Congre- 
gationalists and Baptists. Again and again 
I asked friends of my own, some of them 



222 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



extreme High Churchmen, whether they would 
refuse me if I presented myself, and the worst 
answer I received was, ''Don't ask me, hut 
come." To many the fact that permission is 
not strictly according to rule seemed a real 
distress. Why should it not be made clear 
and explicit that the Bread and Wine in an 
English Church are as free to members of other 
Christian communions as they are, let us say, 
in St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh? Why 
should the great, sane, charitable heart of the 
Church of England allow its impulses to be 
checked at the bidding of the few extremists 
who dream — vain dream ! — first of a union with 
Rome, before there can be union with the Com- 
munions of their own fellow-countrymen, who 
share in the traditions and the freedom that 
make Britain great? It is at least true that 
the present condition of things is the most seri- 
ous of all menaces to unity; the feelings en- 
gendered by the exclusiveness of the Church of 
England in this matter act like an acrid poison 
in the veins of the Body of Christ in our land. 
We can never be one — we can never in any 
deep sense know the blessedness of religious 
charity — until we can truly meet together to 



THE CHURCH 223 

do what the Lord Himself bade us do in re- 
membrance of Him. 



Ill 



We have left to the close the consideration 
of the third end for which the Church exists, 
that of extending the Kingdom of God; inas- 
much as its realisation depends greatly on the 
achievement of union. This object is a su- 
preme one for the Church; and she must take 
strict account of her stewardship in this mat- 
ter. It is here that the unspoken criticism of 
the soldier makes itself felt most; especially, 
perhaps, amongst men who in private life 
would tend to belong to the Labour movement. 
It is true that Labour as an international force 
has proved itself as impotent as anything else 
in this war. The German Socialist has shown 
that he is a German first and an international 
Socialist a long way after. But two blacks 
do not make a white; and, in any case, men 
seem to feel, justly, that the Church has made 
more pretension to be the healer of the world's 
sores than any other institution, and may 
therefore be the more legitimately criticised. 



224 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

In a vague way she is blamed for not having 
been more successful in cleansing the Augean 
stables of modern European civilisation. 

Here, as in other directions, criticism is not 
entirely according to knowledge. Little ac- 
count seems to be taken of the severity of the 
opposition which any society endeavouring to 
further the aim of Christ has to encounter. 
That the heart of man is deceitful and des- 
perately wicked is not allowed for : nor is credit 
given for the heroic and chivalrous efforts that 
the Church has made. The imagination sel- 
dom seems to have attempted a portrayal of a 
modern Europe without the Church: nor was 
there anything like adequate acknowledgment 
of that Christian romance, so much of it lying 
in the nineteenth century, which is the story of 
Foreign Missions. But the fact that there is 
so much disappointment, half-sad, half -resent- 
ful, with the Church as a social and political 
power, is one that we all must reckon with: 
and from it we must draw inferences, which 
may lead to our zealous amendment. 

The deeper criticisms on the Church are not 
often made explicit by soldiers ; but more than 
one observer will tell us that, though unspoken, 



THE CHURCH 225 



they are there. I have very little doubt that 
many a man, if he would open his mind, would 
acknowledge that he is disappointed with the 
Church because her members are not spiritual 
enough : and would attribute her lack of social 
power to that fact. When criticism of that 
kind comes, especially from men who have 
offered their bodies as living ramparts that we 
may continue in life, what can we do but bow 
the head and ask for God's mercy and for His 
help in days to come that we may, individually, 
show more of the spirit of the Master? It is 
true that He works through us ; and it is trag- 
ically true that He has His treasure in very 
earthen vessels. The aggressive work of the 
Church is continually being rendered arduous 
by the Church herself. Professing Christians 
often block the path of Christianity. It is a 
truism, but it is a fact that should startle us all 
the more for that, that the efficacy of the 
Church, as an instrument to extend Christ's 
kingdom, depends on the spiritual vitality of 
the individual Christian. Let us all get our- 
selves to prayer; and may God help us, and 
send us His Spirit. 

But, while we humbly and with repentance 



226 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

acknowledge the fundamental necessity for a 
renewal of vital religion in each professing 
Christian as the prime condition of effectual 
aggressive work of the Church, we see also 
other amendments to which we must set our 
hand. We must seek not only to be renovated 
as individuals: we must see to it that as a 
Society we are employing our resources in the 
right way. We must ask ourselves what 
weapons we have for use in our warfare, and 
whether they are being used aright. There 
are two, in particular, which ought to be strong 
in our hands — the weapon of truth and the 
weapon of the moral sense of good men. With 
these as sword and spear, though an host were 
encamped against us, we need not be afraid. 

One of the greatest texts in the Gospel of 
St. John implies that men that know the truth 
shall be made free. The liberty which the 
Church comes to bring to mankind is dependent 
upon the reception by mankind of the truth 
which she is to proclaim. Wherefore, let her 
proclaim it. There is in certain quarters a 
dangerous reaction against the ministry of the 
Word. Preaching is belittled, and a cere- 
monial is offered in its place. The Sacraments 



THE CHURCH 227 

are exalted at the expense of the Word instead 
of sharing an. equal dignity. Some of the 
clergy speak as if Christ's last command was, 
"Go ye into all the world and baptize"; 
whereas His instruction was, "Go ye into all 
the world and preach." The baptizing is put 
into a participial clause. In the early days 
St. Peter and some others with him began the 
extension of Christianity by preaching; and 
the Church has not yet found an aggressive 
method to supersede his. We shall never 
move forward if we hesitate to declare the faith 
by which we live. 

But we must constantly be watching the 
subject-matter of our preaching. If there is 
an Anglican danger of minimising the import- 
ance of preaching, there is a Nonconformist 
danger of making it trivial. What we are to 
be at is the proclamation of the truth that 
makes free. It is the great themes that we 
must dwell on. There are enough of them 
and to spare. Sin, Forgiveness, Redemption, 
the Indwelling Spirit, Love, Eternal Life — 
all the great words that deal with the relation 
between the soul and God — have to be made 
living realities to men. The story of the Cross 



228 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

has to be told and re-told: has to be brooded 
upon and seen in its universal significance and 
then declared with passion and with faith. A 
prophetic ministry that is concerned with the 
eternal things is a vital necessity. Most men 
who have done religious work with the armies 
recognise that the most eager attention is given 
to speech about the largest subjects. The men 
are hungry and need bread ; and it is poor work 
to offer them pastry. The ministry must take 
up its prophetic task anew, and be content with 
nothing less than the proclamation of the gos- 
pel of Jesus Christ. Men who have gazed 
with open eyes on death have a right to demand 
no less from those who would be their spiritual 
guides. 

Still further, if the Church is to be aggres- 
sive as she may be she must mobilize and con- 
centrate the force of the moral sense of the 
community. This she fails to do at present for 
two reasons: first, because she is a house di- 
vided against herself, and, second, because so 
much of the strongest goodness in the land is 
without her borders. To overcome the former 
difficulty, she must seek union ; to overcome the 



THE CHURCH 229 

latter, she must reconsider her attitude to her 
creeds. ' 

If no other impetus to Christian unity were 
needed, the spectacle of the divided moral 
counsels of Christendom would lead us to seek 
it. To take the Scottish example, we at pres- 
ent possess two chief courts of the Church, 
meeting at the same time within a few yards 
of each other in Edinburgh. A public ques- 
tion — let us say on education — is before them 
both at the same hour; and diametrically op- 
posite resolutions may be passed by the two in 
the name of religion. Where is the voice of 
the Church? If only the two were one, and 
could (as they would, if they were one) ham- 
mer out a common course of action, Demos 
and his at present grinning crew of followers 
would begin to think of the moral power of 
Christianity in a new way. Only by united 
action can the worldly forces, which for so long 
have piped the tune to which our civilisation 
has danced, be made afraid of the Church of 
Christ. And it is high time that they were 
afraid. It will be a great day for Britain 
when the Church will be again a terror to evil- 



230 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

doers and the public opponent in public affairs 
of all who put profit before justice, and money 
in place of God. And the sign-post, which 
points us to that consummation, directs us first 
to the place where we shall be made one. 

But the Church does not contain, by any 
means, all the moral energy of the community 
within her membership; although the testi- 
mony of a man who cannot be called a 
Christian must not be forgotten. "All the 
finest people I have known — the kind of peo- 
ple to whom I would go in trouble — have 
been Christian," he said. Nevertheless, much 
moral energy is at present beyond her borders ; 
and it seems clear that her attitude to her 
creeds is in part the cause. Is there no hope 
that, through her present experiences, the 
Church may be induced to learn a little and to 
forget still more? Is the only result of the 
war to be that the Wesleyans, let us say, are to 
be more attached than ever to the details of the 
views expressed in John Wesley's sermons, and 
the Catholic party in the Church of England 
to become permanently convinced of the plen- 
ary philosophic inspiration of Aquinas? And 
are we in Scotland to admit that all the light 



THE CHURCH 231 

there is streams between the bars of the West- 
minster Confession, with the assistance of Dec- 
laratory Acts and Formulas of subscription? 
Surely the agony of the years has taught us 
otherwise. We are but children, looking out 
on a perplexing world, as were our fathers be- 
fore us ; and we are only beginning to learn the 
unsearchable riches of Christ. The faith by 
which we live is a very simple thing; its intel- 
lectual implications are universal. We hold 
to the faith, but we must be prepared to admit 
that we, and those who went before us, may 
have made mistakes as to the inferences to be 
drawn therefrom as to the construction of the 
itJniverse. The late Principal Denney of 
Glasgow was no light challenger of the faith. 
No man of his time gained more completely the 
confidence of devout Scotland. Yet it was he 
who pleaded for a very simple expression of 
faith as alone binding upon members of the 
Church. "I believe in God, through Jesus 
Christ, His only Son, our Lord and Saviour," 
was the formula he suggested. The creeds 
and confessions were to be kept as the great, 
historic attempts to develop the intellectual 
implications of the statement of simple faith. 



232 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

They hold the ground, until the Church, led by- 
God's Spirit, can amend or supplement them. 
She will wait a long time before she can im- 
prove on the Nicene Creed. But the state- 
ment of the faith in which men face life and 
death ought to be simpler than any of the his- 
toric creeds; and it is that statement which 
ought to link all Christians together. 

At any rate, many a man, who shrinks from 
our articles, or even frankly charges us with 
dishonesty in regard to them, would be in our 
ranks if some such formula were all to which 
his subscription was asked. And without 
these men, many of them amongst the strong- 
est we have, the Church as a moral power in the 
land cannot be made perfect. Is it too much 
to hope that the Church will admit to her ranks 
all those who honour and serve her Lord? 

If only the Christianity of the world could 
be unified within the Church, the day of great 
peace would have dawned. But that is not 
yet come. Still, the Reformed Church of 
Britain may set an example by gathering all 
the Christian forces of her people into one 
channel. It is worth the effort and the prayer 
of all who care for their land. Some indeed — 



THE CHURCH 



especially a well-known writer, versed in the 
souls of bishops — seem to think that Christian- 
ity must get outside the Church to become 
strong. As if the first result would not be the 
creation of a new Church. No — the Church is 
strong as she is ancient, and though she be as- 
sailed and, at a time, defeated, she has within 
her a principle of life drawn from her living 
Head. Broken, divided, distressed, still she 
is the Church of Christ, and she will be used 
of Him and strengthened by Him, till the na- 
tions shall be gathered within her, and she, the 
Church victorious, shall be the Church at rest. 



THE LAST JUDGMENT 



CHAPTER X 
The Last Judgment 

THERE is no truth the Church needs to 
emphasise more in these days than the 
truth that God, the Maker of all things, is also 
the Judge of all men. For the thought of 
judgment and the fear of punishment have 
been well-nigh effaced from the consciousness 
of this generation. With many God has be- 
come superfluous. Possessed by the obsession 
that because they could explain how things 
happened, God had nothing to do with their 
happening, the wise no longer conceded to the 
Creator any place in His own universe. For 
these, no thought of a future judgment dis- 
turbed their bliss ; for there being no God, there 
could be no judge. But others, unable quite 
to dispense with God, created for themselves 
a God in their own image. Having them- 
selves lost the sense of sin, they could no longer 
conceive God as angry against sin or waging 
war upon sin. The one attribute of God 

237 



238 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

which they could conceive was love. The God 
of the latest generation became a Being all 
compact of amiability and sentimentality, so 
divorced from justice and righteousness that 
He could no longer judge and no longer con- 
demn. When justice and mercy conflicted, 
mercy always held the field. The God Who 
sat on the throne of the universe was now a 
God Who no longer could command respect. 
Justice and judgment were no longer the 
foundations of His throne. His devotees 
could live as they listed. For, whatever they 
did, their God was so pitiful and so weakly 
compassionate that He no longer meted out 
righteous judgment nor turned any sinner into 
hell. And one need not wonder that the result 
was the world as we know it — a world freed 
from restraint and discipline, hastening to the 
chaos of disintegration and doom. 



We have only to consider the working of 
God in the world to realise that the whole fab- 
ric of human life rests for its well-being upon 
the foundation of judgment. The conception 



THE LAST JUDGMENT 239 

of God feeble in judgment is the offspring of 
but vain imagining. For everywhere judg- 
ment reigns. 

The whole of society is reared upon it. At 
the base of society is the family, and the wel- 
fare of the family depends on the fact that 
each member is responsible to the father. In 
other days family discipline was a power for 
righteousness. The decay of family life has 
sprung from the decay of discipline. Parents 
confess now their helplessness. "We can no 
longer control our children," they say, wearily, 
as if washing their hands of all responsibility. 
And the end of these children is misery. 
There are no children more to be pitied than 
the children of parents who are too amiable to 
exercise judgment. For they become the 
pests of society — a plague to their fellows and 
destruction to themselves. 

If the exercise of judgment be the primary 
requisite of a healthy family life, so also is it 
of the community. Our lives are safe and our 
property secure because the community has 
organised itself for the swift and certain ex- 
ercise of judgment upon the law-breaker. 
Were this not so, were men free to work their 



240 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 



will upon us, which of us could count his life 
safe for* a day? The foundation upon which 
the well-ordered State rears its manifold activ- 
ities in security is that of exercised judgment. 
Wherever it fails, there chaos and carnage en- 
sue. The centuries of the past and the day in 
which we live agree at least that this is true. 
Whether we look at Russia in the throes of 
dissolution, at Greece helpless and well-nigh 
ruined, or at the Isle of unrest near our own 
shores, we see the misery that falls when judg- 
ment fails. It is, indeed, the naked truth that 
no calamity can overtake any nation greater 
than that the supreme guidance of its affairs 
should fall into hands that no longer can vindi- 
cate justice through judgment. The family, 
the community, the nation, and the interna- 
tional relations of humanity, all rest upon this 
rock — righteous judgment. 

And this sense of justice and judgment, 
which is the framework of society, what is it 
but a pale reflection of that justice and judg- 
ment which are throned at the core of the uni- 
verse? As there can be nothing in the work 
of man's hands except what was first in the 
man, so there can be nothing in the handiwork 



THE LAST JUDGMENT 241 



of God except what was first in God. And if 
the dim sense of justice by which we guide our 
acts impels us to strike, stifling the voice of the 
heart, rather than spare, stifling the voice of 
justice, we can be certain that God's perfect 
justice will vindicate itself in unswerving 
judgment. Whatever failure there may be on 
the part of human justice, we can, at least, be 
certain of this, that the Judge of all the earth 
will do the right. 

II 

The judgment of God is not relegated to a 
far-off day in the shadowy future; it is for 
ever being exercised. However solemn it may 
be to think of a dramatic and cataclysmic judg- 
ment before the bar of God in the great assize, 
it is even more solemn to think that we stand 
now at God's great judgment throne, and that 
every day is a day of judgment. Formerly, 
our fathers thrilled with awe as they thought 
of coming judgment; we ought to stand in awe 
when we think of present judgment. For 
judgment is not so much an event in the future 
as it is a continuous process in the present. 



242 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

By our attitude to God, by our resistance or 
conformity to His will, we are now judged. 

When we thus realise the ceaseless processes 
of God's judgments, our startled eyes quickly 
behold them all round about us. For God has 
so ordered that every transgression of His law 
carries its own punishment in its bosom. The 
world is filled with the products of His judg- 
ments. The drunkard, who breaks the law of 
temperance and sinks into that slough into 
which the animals sink not, rapidly reaps in 
darkened mind, disordered nerves, and palsied 
frame the judgment of God. The man who 
makes himself the centre of the universe, and 
sacrifices the law of love to his selfishness, rap- 
idly reaps the fruit of his sin in that isolation, 
more terrible than walls of steel, which shuts 
him in from all sympathy and all love. 

"He that shuts love out in turn shall be shut out 
from love, 
And on her threshold lie howling in outer darkness." 

But more terrible than all do we behold the 
operation of the law of judgment in the sphere 
of purity. In other years it was impossible 
for the preacher to speak of this. But now, 



THE LAST JUDGMENT MS 

stung broad awake, we realise that we must 
look facts in the face, and turn the searchlight 
on the dark places whose nonexistence we fool- 
ishly assumed. What does God do with those 
who transgress the law of purity? He visits 
them with the most awful judgment. The 
fruit of sin is paralysis, the enfeebled brain, the 
diseased body, the vitiated heredity, so that 
whole families are swept out of existence. 
The innocent suffer with the guilty. Half the 
blinded children are blinded through the sin of 
their parents. Their growth is checked and 
hideous deformities produced — a veritable 
massacre of the innocents. 

If you think the preaching of the judgment 
of God antiquated, this is what you should do. 
Go to the poor-houses, the hospitals, the gaols, 
and ponder the sights which you there shall see, 
and ask how these men and women came to be 
wreckage and driftwood on the human sea. 
And walk through the streets with open eyes, 
and you will see God's judgment working 
ceaselessly, His great winnowing-fan for ever 
separating the wheat from the chaff, until cor- 
rupt humanity is piled up in refuse heaps and 
there slowly consumed by destructive processes 



244 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

infinitely more terrible than the blaze of mate- 
rial flame. The essence of all woe is in the cry 
of the man who, faced at last with incurable 
paralysis as the fruit of his sin, cried out, "My 
God, why did not somebody warn me?" How 
incredible that anyone should be unconscious of 
the dread solemnity of life, blind to that judg- 
ment throne at which each individual soul 
stands thus every day and every hour! 

Ill 

The process of the Divine judgment can be 
seen on a greater stage when we look beyond 
the individual to the nation and contemplate 
the history of man in his corporate capacity. 
When nations are viewed in the light of God's 
moral law, then the history of the world is 
mainly the history of human crime and of the 
ensuing judgment. This is the record with 
which the Bible is filled : the record of Israel's 
sin and of the judgment of their sin. The 
Assyrian is the instrument of Divine justice; 
exile and woe the fruit of sin. 

All history glows with the same truth, and 
thus all history is sacred. The most gifted 



THE LAST JUDGMENT 245 

race that ever lived, whose literature and art 
are still the despair of those who would follow 
their steps, surrendered to the base and the 
sensual, and were swept into destruction, leav- 
ing behind the Greece we know to-day. Rome 
conquered the world, but in the day of its tri- 
umph was conquered by its lusts, and over the 
Alps came the scourge of God. In fire and 
sword and blood the gangrene of Imperial 
Home was at last consumed. In these latter 
years we have beheld the same dread forces at 
work. France, which made all Europe cower 
at her feet, fifty years later lay prostrate at the 
feet of Germany. For France surrendered 
herself to corruption, and threw to the winds 
the restraints of that religion which she now 
spurned. When the enemy swept to the gates 
of Paris forty years ago, no man's word in 
France could be believed! In "extinguishing 
the light of heaven," France extinguished the 
might of her right hand ; and in our day Paris 
was saved because the British in the West and 
the Russians in the East were its invisible de- 
fenders. If history proves anything, it proves 
that judgment follows hard in the wake of de- 
generation; that the universe is so ordered that 



246 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

the stars in their courses fight against every 
Sisera. 

To-day, before God's judgment throne are 
gathered all nations, and the sheep are being 
parted asunder from the goats. All round us 
the heavens are ablaze with the Divine judg- 
ment. It was inevitable that it should be so, 
for humanity had deposed God and placed 
Mammon on the throne. Men were sinking 
in the morass of foul pleasure, and their eyes 
were blinded. Idealism was dying, and sanc- 
tity had become a jest. If humanity were not 
to be lost to God, the process of crowding God 
out of their lives had to be brought to a halt. 
As the slowly accumulating forces at last burst 
out into volcanic eruption, so the slowly ac- 
cumulating evils in the world at last burst into 
the tornado of war, which now devours them. 
In a measure more awful than it has ever been 
meted to the world before, judgment is poured 
out upon the earth. Races which ceased to be- 
lieve in it now behold it. Before the eyes, 
naked, appalling, colossal, it looms. The veil 
which hides the unseen has been suddenly rent 
asunder, and a voice ringing from heaven cries 
to men: "Behold what comes to men when 



THE LAST JUDGMENT 247 

they defy God; while there is yet time, make 
haste and repent." And on men suddenly 
awakened from slumber there is dawning 
again the realisation of life's moral values and 
spiritual issues, and awed lips murmur: "we 
see." And preachers raise their voices once 
more, and proclaim God's righteous judg- 
ments. They seem unreal and far remote al- 
ready, the days when men thought there was 
no sword of judgment with God. Therein lies 
the hope of the future. For as there is no 
hope of an army that knows not the judgment 
seat of discipline, so there can be no hope of 
humanity walking in the paths of moral 
straightness without the sense that they are 
standing at the judgment seat of God. Our 
wakening to judgment is the bugle-note of 
hope. 

IV 

But to all that you may object that you are 
wholly unconscious of having done anything 
deserving of judgment, and wholly uncon- 
scious of any judgment. That is the most 
terrible of all the symptoms of our moral de- 
cay. It was always like that in past ages. 



248 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

Judgment befell, and nations came to the end, 
not even knowing that it was the end. The 
Romans battered the walls of Zion, but the 
Jew refused to believe in the end. Empires 
fell into ruin, but their citizens ever refused 
to believe that the fruit of centuries, that an- 
cient civilisations which appeared eternal, 
were crumbling before their eyes. They faced 
the great assize, but knew it not. Once more 
history repeats itself, and a world, unconscious 
of judgment, is being judged. 

What happens at last is this: the veil of 
illusion is stripped from our eyes, and we be- 
hold reality. With the unveiling of the eyes 
in death, the soul knows itself already judged. 
Events which at the time seemed commonplace 
and trifling will stand forth decisive, pregnant 
with the issues of eternity. And such com- 
mon-places : sharing a meal with a hungry la- 
bourer, giving of our love to the poor who 
knock tremulously at the door, visiting a poor 
sick neighbour and cheering him up — acts so 
small that we deem them as nothing. Yet the 
Lord says: "that was great; ye did it to Me." 
When we took Him in, all unknowing, and fed 
Him and clothed Him in the person of the out- 



THE LAST JUDGMENT 249 

cast, in that hour our judgment was sealed — 
though we knew it not. And in that hour 
when he shut the door with a snap upon the 
piteous cry of him who stood without, we were 
judged — for we shut God out. And, accord- 
ing to the judgment already passed, but now 
revealed, will the soul in death pass into the 
nearness to God or the banishment far from 
Him. The great solemnity of life is therefore 
this: We stand now at the judgment bar of 
God; we are now being judged. Death will 
but reveal the verdict already passed. 



To the soul that sees, however dimly, the 
working of God's hand, His judgments are not 
grievous. For the hope of the world is bound 
up with God's judgment. Were wickedness 
left un judged, and corruption unchecked, the 
world would speedily become a gangrene. 
What the surgeon's knife is to the diseased 
body, that the judgment of God is to corrupt 
humanity. To the power of the sinner to de- 
file and corrupt, it sets a limit. The diseased 
member is cut off that the body may live. 



250 GOD AND THE SOLDIER 

Were not God's great winnowing-fan ever 
separating the chaff from the wheat, the 
growth of the wheat would be imperilled. 
And though the skies to-day be dark with thick 
clouds, yet their blackness is irradiated by 
mercy. Through the roar of destruction 
comes the still small voice of hope. If a civ- 
ilization is perishing, it is because it deserved to 
perish, and that a fairer and more God-like 
may arise. Wherefore we shall cling to our 
God. Though He smite, yet will He heal us. 
For the hearts that turn to Him and seek Him 
will He make a great light to arise. 



THE END 



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